Lonergan was prepared to look as though he were listening and to make all the necessary rejoinders, but he found that Valentine could give what he recognized with some astonishment as being a genuine attention to the General’s monologue although from sheer lack of imagination he made whatever he talked about seem uninteresting.
Once or twice Valentine appealed to Primrose, and once she brought the conversation round to the London background with a direct question, but she got no response.
Primrose let fall some sounds — they seemed hardly even to be recognizable syllables — from the corner of her mouth and pushed her plate away, the food on it left almost untouched.
“I can’t hear a word you’re saying, Primrose,” remarked the General. “Why don’t you speak up?”
Primrose made no reply whatever and Valentine, speaking gaily, said:
“You’re very difficult, Reggie dear. You tell Jess not to scream because you can’t hear a word she’s saying, and now you tell poor Primrose to speak up, for the same reason.”
At that Primrose, for the first time, looked her mother full in the face.
“For God’s sake don’t start standing up for me, there’s nothing I loathe more, or need less.”
The sense of shock imposed by the tone in which she spoke, no less than by the words themselves, kept them all silent for an ice-cold second.
Then Jess, in a high key, began an exclamatory” I must say—” checked by her mother’s low, distinct voice.
“Very well, Primrose darling,” said Valentine — and there was even something in her tone that hinted at a smile.” I won’t stand up for you if you’d rather I didn’t. “She turned her head towards Lonergan and went on with exactly the same placidity.
“Why does one generation always accuse the next one of speaking indistinctly? An ear-trumpet can’t be the sole solution.”
“I’d be sorry to think so,” he agreed, with such lightness of tone as her own had been. “Otherwise I’d be looking for an ear-trumpet myself. Not that I believe people use them now, unless it’s on the stage. My poor sister Nellie, who’s very deaf indeed, has a most peculiar little invention.”
He went on to describe it.
Valentine listened, commented, General Levallois asked in what part of Ireland Lonergan’s sister lived, and, on being told that it was in the South, was immediately moved to put what he described as a question but what was, in reality, an embittered series of condemnations.
The bad moment was over — averted. Lonergan could have told the precise instant at which Valentine, gently unplaiting the fringes of her shawl from the arm of her chair, let the tide of pain that Primrose had loosed, rise within her. It was not a sharp, violent pain, he felt it must be too familiar for that. Rather must it be the recurrence of some deep-rooted misery that twisted in her heart and against which she had long ceased to rebel because rebellion was so useless.
He wondered very much at the skill with which she had handled that brief, intolerable minute of tension.
Was it just part of a social training that instinctively served her and would always serve her, or was it one way of protecting herself from facing a bitter truth? Did she always oppose the smooth, unreal self-effacement of the super-civilized to the onslaught of real emotion?
“There’s a great deal in what you say, sir,” he assured the General. “At the same time, Dev has done quite a lot for his own people according to his lights. I could tell you of instances—”
He noticed, with a pleasure that he felt to be rather irrational, that Valentine was not now seeking, as she had sought earlier in the evening, to avert the General’s foolish spate of assertions and counter-assertions on the subject of Ireland.
She was leaving Lonergan to deal with them, taking for granted his ability to do so without discomfiture to himself—for she would never, he felt certain, run the risk of allowing a stranger to endure discomfiture.
He and she, however, were most certainly not strangers.
On that conviction, Lonergan let his analysis of the situation rest temporarily.
When dinner was over, and they had moved out of the cold dining-room to the comparative warmth of the hall, Primrose said to him curtly:
“Have you seen the room that’s supposed to be your office?”
“Yes. I saw it for a minute before dinner. It seems charming.”
“The fire is laid there,” said Valentine, “if you’d like to use it to-night. Please do, if you want to.”
“Thank you very much. Perhaps later on.”
He found himself looking at her, gravely and with attention, and averted his gaze with a conscious effort.
It met, for once squarely and fully, a look from Primrose who was standing behind her mother.
She signalled to him, briefly and competently with a backward jerk of the head, that he should seek the little breakfast-room now to be his office, and that she would join him there.
Lonergan slightly shook his head. He gave her at the same time what he himself had candidly described to more than one lady of his intimate acquaintance as “a look that’s as good as a declaration”, with narrowed, smiling eyes and an almost imperceptible movement of the lips.
He wished, at the moment, neither to humiliate her nor to let her think that he had been antagonized by her behaviour at dinner.
It was not possible to tell how she reacted inwardly to his refusal. Her face remained a mask, with its look of embittered discontent that gave the impression of having been painted on.
But Primrose, he reflected, had the hard, genuine shrewdness of disillusioned youth and showed sometimes an unexpected and disconcerting degree of intuition.
“… late for the news,” General Levallois was saying.
As Lonergan glanced at his watch, sure that it was a quarter of an hour too early for the Nine O’Clock News, the old spaniel and the puppy both broke into vehement barking, drowning the far-away jangle of the bell just as it became audible.
The General shouted a command at the dogs and Jess, shouting also, dominated all the clamour.
“I’ll go!”
The spaniel flopped to the floor again, and the puppy pranced after Jessica to the front door.
“It must be Captain Sedgewick,” said Valentine, and she stood up.
Lonergan, rising also, saw rather than heard the words “My God!” forming themselves on Primrose’s lips.
She turned away and went through the door behind which, Lonergan knew already, was the telephone.
He heard the faint tinkle indicating that she had lifted off the receiver.
Valentine moved forward to meet the arrival. Jess could be heard talking to him with friendly, effortless enthusiasm.
“What the devil makes people turn up just when one wants to be listening to the news? Ought to have more sense,” grumbled the General.
He looked across at Lonergan, who could almost see the thought, rising slowly in his mind that, give the devil his due, this Irish fellow hadn’t done that.
With the nearest approach to cordiality that he had yet shown, General Levallois remarked:
“I think I’ll listen to it in my own den. I don’t know whether you’d care to come along — get out of this racket.”
“Thanks very much indeed, sir, but I think perhaps, as Sedgewick knows I’m here—”
“Ah,” said the General, “there’s something in that, I daresay.”
He reached for his sticks and hobbled off, with a not unfriendly “Good-night. Shan’t be coming down again,” and disappeared as the others returned.
Captain Sedgewick, whose physical type so unfailingly suggested a fox to Lonergan’s imagination, was as cool, as unembarrassed and completely self-assured as his superior officer had always seen him.
He was an excellent soldier, better liked by his men than by his brother officers who knew him for a social climber.
A general conversation, polite and insignificant, followed.
Primrose made no return, unti
l Valentine had offered to show Captain Sedgewick his room.
“I had four hours’ sleep last night, and none the night before,” he admitted, “so if I may, I’ll say good-night. That is to say, unless you wanted me for anything tonight, sir,” he added, addressing Lonergan. “I understand your office is here.”
“I do not indeed. The office is still in the town; this is only an unofficial office, so to say, that Lady Arbell has been kind enough to put at my disposal up here.”
The formality of his own speech rather amused Lonergan, inwardly. He knew that had he been either alone with Sedgewick, or alone with Valentine, he would have worded the phrase quite differently.
Unexpectedly, out of the blue, he felt himself seized by a sick impatience, directed against himself and his eternal readiness to say and to do the thing that was appropriate to the situation.
He wanted, suddenly and imperatively, simply to ask Valentine if she wouldn’t come downstairs again and talk to him.
“Jess, if you’re going up to see Madeleine, darling, ask her if she’ll be kind and go through all Primrose’s things to-morrow.”
Valentine turned to Lonergan.
“I’ll be down again presently, but you’ll do just as you prefer about going up to bed, or writing or anything, won’t you?”
“Thank you.”
Jess said okay, cried a general good-night to everyone and stooped to pick up her dog.
It took her a long while to adjust aunt Sophy to any degree of submissive tranquillity and Lonergan watched her with unreflective amusement.
When at last she went up the curving stairway, he took out a cigarette and stood looking round for a spill.
Primrose, with her thick coat drawn on over her blue frock, was suddenly there, coming towards him — and Lonergan was actually startled as though she were someone from another world.
So, indeed, she was, but on the heels of that thought there came, clear and complete as the statement of a mathematical problem, his realization of the inevitable, complicated and difficult adjustment towards which they were moving.
The sound of her very first words told him that she was angry.
“It’s been one hell of a lovely evening, hasn’t it? What the devil’s the matter with you, Rory?”
“I’m not sure.”
If she wants a show-down, let her have it, he thought, making himself deliberately callous.
“Well, if you’re not, I am. You’re shocked, like the sentimentalist you are, because I’m what I really feel with mummie instead of putting on an act for your benefit.”
“I don’t want you to put on an act for my benefit, and you know it. The best thing about you is that you’re honest, as I’ve told you before.”
“Then what’s the matter? What did you come here for, if you don’t want to spend the time with me when we’ve got the chance?”
“I don’t see how I’m to make love to you, under your mother’s own roof, when I’m here as her guest.”
He felt ashamed of himself as he put forward his excuse, factually so well grounded and in reality so false.
“My God, Rory, you didn’t say that in London. Things haven’t changed, since then.”
But they had — only he couldn’t tell her so.
“Primrose,” he said slowly, “obviously you think I’m the world’s cad, and I’m fairly sure you’re right.”
He stopped, for once uncertain how to continue. She looked at him scornfully.
“I see. You’ve found somebody else. It would have been more decent to say so before you brought me down here on a fool’s errand. However, you needn’t worry, I can take it.”
He noticed, with a horrid compunction, that two dark shadows had suddenly sprung into life beneath her angry, contemptuous eyes and that behind the contempt there was real pain.
“Oh, God — Primrose!”
Unable to bear it, he pulled her into his arms.
She pressed against him, her anger disappeared.
“Darling, don’t be such a fool. Why, in God’s name, will you always mix up love with all this sentimental, romantic bloody nonsense of yours?”
He could have answered that — had, indeed, answered it before — but it would be of no use.
Instead, he made the only answer she wanted or would understand and kissed her hard and passionately, giving her love as she knew and desired it and himself moved by the instantaneousness of her response.
“I don’t give a damn, really, if you have got another girl,” she muttered. “This is all that matters.”
Lonergan held her close and kissed her again, hating and despising himself.
“Was that why you wouldn’t come into the breakfast-room this evening?”
“What?”
“Because you’ve started a thing with somebody else?”
“I haven’t.”
She drew back, honestly bewildered.
“Then what the hell—”
“What I said. I don’t see how I can make love to you here,” he repeated doggedly.
“But I’ve told you it’s all right ! No one’s going to worry. My room is at the far end of the passage from yours — the last door on the left — and there’s no one anywhere near. Anyhow, nobody dreams of stirring out of their rooms after eleven o’clock in this house.”
He stared at her without finding a word to utter.
“Rory — my sweet—”
“In the name of God, child, don’t go on like that! It’s no good. I ought never to have come here.”
He found the sweat breaking out on his forehead as he loosed his hold of her.
Primrose said incredulously:
“D’you mean you’re not coming to me to-night?”
“I’ve told you I’m not.”
Primrose was silent for a moment, looking at him, then she said, in the curt, slashing tones that she affected under the stress of anger or disconcertment:
“Thanks for the flowers, darling. And next time, when, you’ve got over your panic, don’t bother to come and explain things to me, because you won’t find me.”
There was the sound of footfalls coming down the stairs.
“Primrose — will you please let me talk to you tomorrow?”
“I shouldn’t think so.”
“Please, darling.”
“I’m not like you. I think all this talking is idiotic and gets people just nowhere.”
Valentine reached the bottom step.
“Jess and Madeleine are listening-in to a dance band in Madeleine’s room. Madeleine was my mother’s French maid, years ago,” Valentine said, addressing Lonergan.
“So what?” drawled Primrose, and without further word she, in her turn, went up the stairs, leaving Valentine and Rory Lonergan alone by the fire in the hall.
They were both silent, Valentine stirring a log on the hearth with her foot, Lonergan motionless, seeking to fight down the sense of extreme discomfiture left by his scene with Primrose, and to establish within himself some kind of mental and emotional equilibrium.
He could not have told how long they had stood, speechless, when it occurred to him that Valentine, too, had found readjustment necessary. The atmosphere of hostility that Primrose’s last words had created could hardly have failed to move her mother painfully.
Lonergan felt very sorry. On an impulse to do something for her, he pushed one of the armchairs nearer the fire.
“Will you not sit down and stay for a little while?” he asked gently.
She smiled and seated herself, and Lonergan took the chair opposite.
He was taken by surprise when she said with a simplicity that added dignity to her directness:
“Did you know that we were going to meet again?”
“Not until this evening, just before I got here. I’d only heard your married name and it didn’t convey anything to me. Did you know?”
“When I heard that an Irish colonel called Lonergan might be coming, I felt that it might probably be you. And then Jess heard
your first name, and I knew.”
“It’s curious.”
“Very,” she assented.
“Do you know that you’ve altered very little?” he said. “I don’t mean that I’d have known you anywhere, as the saying goes, but that, essentially, you’ve kept so much of the girl I used to see in the Pincio Gardens.”
“Essentially, I suppose I have. I often feel that I’m still almost as immature as I was then. It’s a silly thing to say about a woman of forty-four, but it’s true, I think.”
“Yes,” said Lonergan. “It’s what I meant. Is that impertinent of me?”
She shook her head.
“Tell me about yourself. You’ve not stayed immature, at all events, although in appearance you’ve altered less than I have. That’s astonishing. Did you go on painting?”
“I did, after a fashion. But the war of 1914 was an interruption, and then I went home to Ireland for a bit and did no good there, and after my mother died I left my sister Nellie — who was predestined for an old maid — to look after my father, and went to Paris. I’m just not good enough, you know, though I’ve been able to make a living with illustration work, and drawing for various papers, and an occasional portrait.”
“And now you’re in the Army again.”
“Believe you me, that’s no hardship. The war came at the very moment when I was sick of Paris, sick of France, sick of myself—only looking for an excuse to turn my back on the whole thing.”
“So it came when you needed it.”
“It did.”
Lonergan allowed no hesitation to interfere with the sound of finality in his short answer, yet he felt himself to be on the verge of adding to it with an admission as unnecessary as it might prove unwise.
He had decided on silence when Valentine’s next words shattered his determination.
“Have you ever married?”
“I have not. But it came to the same thing. We lived together for ten years, till she died, in 1934. She was French.”
Late and Soon Page 6
