Late and Soon

by E M Delafield

  Then, her thoughts coming round again in a circle, she let herself remember the previous evening and her own happiness of the morning.

  She knew that she had not been mistaken as to the atmosphere of mutual understanding, and even tenderness, in which their long conversation had taken place.

  But one might easily be mistaken as to its ultimate significance. Rory Lonergan could have been rendered happy, as she had been herself, by the warmth of the sympathy between them and that faint, romantic, shared memory of the Pincio Gardens, and it might all have meant no more to him than that.

  Valentine had never believed herself to be capable of inspiring passion, but she believed Primrose to be so. And Primrose was young, and men had thought her beautiful before — her arrogant self-assurance, so obviously based upon experiences of a rock-like reality, had long ago convinced her mother of that. She could not have said when nor even why she had first felt certain that Primrose was no longer inexperienced in the ways of passionate love — but the certainty was there.

  Valentine drew up the car in front of the portico. She left it there for Jess to put away.

  The General slowly climbed out backwards. In the hall, he rang the bell. If the weather made it in any way possible he always walked up and down the terrace, round the garden and into the walled kitchen garden every Sunday morning on his return from church, leaning on Madeleine’s arm.

  The bell was his summons to Madeleine.

  Madeleine never grumbled or protested whatever the demands made upon her.

  She loved them all, and she had lived with the Levallois family in the old days.

  She must have grown used to it all, Valentine felt, even to her curious, recluse existence at Coombe where she would have nothing to do with the other servants, always declaring herself unable to understand a word of English, and carrying her own meals up to her sitting-room, to be eaten in solitude.

  She came into the hall now, muffled as though for an Arctic expedition in black-and-white check coat, ancient feather boa, shiny kid gloves, pointed black boots in goloshes and black felt hat with the brim pulled down over her eyes.

  The clumps of her thickly-henna’d hair were visible under the hat. For some reason that Valentine had never analysed, the artificial colour was not out of keeping with the shrewd kindliness of Madeleine’s pale, round face and of her large brown eyes, brilliant as diamonds.

  “Bonjour, Madeleine.”

  “Bonjour, madame.”

  Valentine and the General, Jess and Primrose, always talked with Madeleine in her own language.

  She spoke eagerly now of messieurs les officiers and said that she had met Colonel Lonergan on the stairs and that he had spoken to her in French that she characterized as perfect.

  She had also seen the young Captain, and thought him très gentil, although he had said nothing. He probably knew no French and was less homme du monde than his superior officer, said Madeleine, but she was glad of his presence, which would amuse Mademoiselle Jess.

  “So long as she’s here, but she may be called up any day.”

  “Alas, madame!”

  The General enquired whether Primrose was downstairs yet, and Madeleine, with a subtle change of tone to which Valentine was well accustomed, replied that she was not.

  “Well, we don’t wait luncheon for anyone,” declared the General. “Come on, now, Madeleine — the best of the day’ll be over.”

  Madeleine took one of his sticks — a privilege accorded to nobody else — and substituted her own sturdy arm.

  They disappeared slowly through the garden door.

  Valentine, moving scarcely less slowly, went over to the fire which the maids had as usual neglected to make up, so that it had sunk to red embers on a small bed of wood-ash.

  She put on more logs and, kneeling down, began to blow upon the sparks with the bellows.

  Her mind was dwelling once again on Lonergan’s story of his life in France with Laurence, and on what he had said about Arlette.

  “… I wasn’t interested in her at all till the last year. And now I am.… When all this is over, if I’m still living, I’ll have Arlette with me.”

  All the things that had conditioned his life were things of which she knew practically nothing — his work as an artist, his relationship to Laurence, his belated affection and sense of responsibility towards their child, even his Army career — at best, if he chose to talk to her of them she could enter into his descriptions sympathetically but that was all.

  Other people, of whose very names she was ignorant, had shared his experiences with him and had helped to build up the background of past associations that made up so large a part of every life.

  She turned her mind for a moment towards the future but, in the midst of war, there could be no escape there. To live from day to day was the only possibility, so far as personal problems were concerned. She reminded her self, without much sense of reality, that Rory Lonergan was as likely as any other man in the Forces to lose his life before the end of the war.

  At length her thoughts stopped, where she had known they must, at the immediate present.

  Was she to watch a love-affair develop between Primrose and Lonergan?

  After all, Valentine told herself, it couldn’t prove to be an unendurable situation. Her own romantic illusion had been based on a single evening and could have thrown out no indestructible roots.

  Primrose was her child and she had always wanted, and still wanted, happiness for her. She had even believed that happiness might make Primrose normal and simple and kind, and it had seemed to her that no price could be too high to pay for that.

  I never thought it might come like this though, Valentine reflected, and a dark shadow of misery and uncertainty seemed to settle down upon her spirit.

  She started violently at the sudden noise made by Jess returned from her walk.

  “Mummie, this is frightfully important. I want to ask you something.”

  “What, my precious?”

  Jess, at least, never resented or sneered at terms of endearment even if she never made use of them herself.

  “Well, look, we’ve got all these officers coming for tea and they’ll be staying on for supper, and I don’t suppose I’ll be at home after about another week or something, for the rest of the duration, so couldn’t we possibly, just for once, make a party of it and scrape up some drink for them? Isn’t there anything at all in the cellar?”

  “I think there must be,” said Valentine, touched. “Anyhow, there’s a bottle of sherry left in the wine cooler, and we’ll open that, Jess, and have it in before supper.”

  “Gosh, that’ll be Heaven. And I could not take any, if that’d make it go round better. Actually, I loathe the taste of it unless I mix it with water.”

  “I don’t think you’d better let uncle Reggie see you mixing it with water.”

  “Would he go bats or something? It’d be rather fun to try, in a way. Thanks terrifically, mummie.”

  “Just tell me how many there’ll be.”

  “Buster and a friend who I don’t know the name of, and Captain Sedgewick — he definitely wants to be called Charles, by the way — and I suppose Colonel Lonergan if he’s not too grand?”

  “I’m sure he’s not. Jess — do you like him?”

  “Oh, I think he’s divine. He’s just Irish enough, isn’t he? I mean, I’d have had a definite pain if he’d been after saying Begorrah all day long, like Irish people on the films.”

  Valentine laughed.

  “I don’t believe anybody ever says it at all, off the films.”

  “Oh, the films wouldn’t have it unless somebody did. They’re frightfully realistic and careful about things like that,” Jess asserted. “Prob’ly it’s said like anything in some part of Ireland that Colonel Lonergan doesn’t come from. I’m glad he’ll be here this evening. It’ll suit Primrose fine.”

  “I suppose it will.”

  “Well, she’s sure to despise all the others, isn’t she?
I think Primrose is too terribly like a camel, when she pulls down the corner of her mouth. I wish I could do it. I’ve often tried, but I never can.”

  “My dear, do you really want to look like a camel?”

  “Well, mummie, you can’t say it doesn’t get one somewhere. Look at Primrose! People ringing her up all the evening, and now a Colonel falling for her!”

  Valentine gazed at Jess in silence.

  “Mummie, you look awfully as if you thought I was the Brains Trust or something. Is there anything wrong with me?”

  “No darling. Nothing at all.”

  VII

  Captain Charles Sedgewick, returning from Headquarters four miles away in the market town late that afternoon, deduced from the battered motor-cycle standing before the door of Coombe that Banks and his friend had arrived.

  He went round the house and in at the garden door — that was, he had discovered, always left open — and up to his room without entering the hall.

  He could hear the little girl, Jess, laughing.

  He was a young man who tabulated his impressions of people carefully and he had summed Jess up as a nice kid, unaffected and a good sort, not likely to set the Thames on fire unless she made an unexpectedly brilliant marriage. She might do so, at that, thought Charles Sedgewick, slamming down the heavy window-sash in his unwarmed bedroom.

  Where Jess fell in love, she would almost certainly marry, and where she fell in love would depend entirely on where she happened to be. He knew already that she was niece to Lady Rockingham, and “People of that sort,” he said to himself, “are a regular trades union. Wherever she’s stationed with the WAAF, she’ll get invitations to her own kind of house. I only hope, poor kid, they won’t be as damned uncomfortable as this one is.”

  There was no rancour in the thought.

  Charles Sedgewick despised dependence on creature comforts. He never smoked, seldom drank, and had won a mention in despatches on the beach at Dunkirk.

  His widowed mother’s suburban house had exactly the kind of cosiness that he most disliked and to which, before the war, he had so much preferred a dingy bedroom in the Strand from which he could daily walk to the Bank where he worked. His sentimental mother’s plea that Charlie was all she had in the world and that they ought to make a home for one another until he should marry some nice girl, had not moved him the least.

  He was kind and often affectionate to her, wrote to her frequently, had himself photographed in uniform to please her, and spent most of his leaves at Dunroamin, coldly civil to her circle of Bridge-playing, grievance-mongering and domestically-minded ladies of middle age.

  As for the nice girl that his mother thought she wanted him to marry, Sedgewick had no intention whatever of getting married, least of all to the type of girl his mother called “nice”.

  It would be difficult enough to live at all after the war, should he survive it, without being saddled with a wife.

  With quiet regularity, when on leave he visited the more expensive of the London brothels.

  Capable, energetic and with a cast-iron self-confidence, Sedgewick applied himself to his soldiering and made the most of every opportunity that came in his way.

  He was pleased to be at Coombe, in the same billet as his Colonel and with a family that he had at once classified as “the real thing”.

  As he pulled off his boots, washed his hands and sleeked his smooth, straight red hair close to his narrow head, he wondered what the elder daughter was like.

  He had guessed, from references made by Jess, that she was not of the unsophisticated “county” type. She was three- or four-and-twenty, and had been living an independent existence in London.

  On Lady Arbell he wasted no thoughts at all. She was as completely unreal to him as he probably was to her.

  They would merely exchange the polite spoken symbols of civilization current between two people belonging to different generations and, indeed, different worlds.

  He went downstairs and found the two subalterns — Banks and a stocky North Country youth called Jack Olliver — playing spillikins at a round table in the hall with Jess, her mother and Colonel Lonergan.

  Lady Arbell looked up at him and smiled, enquiring whether he had had any tea.

  Jess and the subalterns, evidently on the friendliest terms already, were loudly disputing over the heaped-up slivers of white bone.

  “I had a cup of tea in the town, thank you.”

  Sedgewick’s extremely observant eye had already discerned that the other daughter, Primrose, was downstairs too. She was sitting in an armchair with her back to the players, and Sedgewick could only see the top of a pale blonde head and two long and well-shaped legs with sandalled feet resting on the hearth.

  “Primrose, I don’t think you’ve met Captain Sedgewick,” said her mother.

  The blonde head turned and Primrose, scarcely moving, looked round the chair-back.

  Her mouth twisted to one side and she made a sound that scarcely amounted to a spoken word.

  Sedgewick thought: “She’s like someone on the stage, playing a Society girl.”

  He moved over and sat down opposite to her.

  “Come in on the next game, Charles,” amiably shouted Jessica.

  “Okay. Thanks, I will.”

  “You don’t have to,” remarked Primrose — and this time he could hear what she said.

  “I like spillikins. Don’t you?”

  “Not particularly. Why should one?”

  “To test the steadiness of one’s hand, perhaps,” Sedgewick suggested.

  He was not interested in what she might be saying, even as an indication of her personality. He was thinking of her looks, of her figure and her long legs and flat, narrow hips, and of her air of arrogant discontent.

  She wasn’t at all like Jess or her mother. Her bad manners, he decided, were just a pose, probably intended to show how different she was.

  They neither pleased nor displeased him. So long as a girl had poise, and was well-turned-out and confident of her own power to attract men, Charles Sedgewick was perfectly ready to be attracted. He had hoped, from the beginning, that one or other of the girls at Coombe might interest him.

  Cries and exclamations came from the players at the round table.

  “Buster! The whole pile rocked! I saw it.”

  “Come on, then. See what you can do.”

  “Steady.… That little hooked one is your best chance.… The Colonel’s left it all ready for you.… Look out — don’t move——”

  “You blew on it, you cad!”

  “I swear I didn’t.”

  Primrose said:

  “How do you like being stationed down here?”

  “It’s okay. Devon’s new to me.”

  “What’s your own part of the world?”

  “London.”

  “Me too.”

  “Now then, sir — you’ve a clear run.”

  “I have not, then. I’ll need a hand like a rock.”

  “That one moved!”

  “Two of them moved.”

  “Most of them did. Lady Arbell, I’ve done all the spade-work for you now.”

  “You drive a van or something, don’t you?” Sedge-wick asked Primrose.

  “That’s right. What I don’t know about London Bridge in the blitz is nobody’s business.”

  “One or two noisy moments, no doubt.”

  “I’ll say so. Have you been mixed up in any of the bomb racket?”

  “Not I. This is a civilians’ war,” Sedgewick answered carelessly.

  He had no intention of telling her that he had been at the Dunkirk evacuation. For one thing he disliked talking about it, and for another he was perfectly well aware that she would neither be, nor pretend to be, in the least interested.

  “Go for that one at the corner and you ought to get the lot.”

  “Keep your head, now, Jess.”

  “You’re putting me off …!”

  There was a shriek from Jess, and lau
ghter and scuffling from the subalterns.

  “I swear I’ve won!” Jess cried earnestly. “Haven’t I, Colonel Lonergan? Don’t listen to Buster and Jack, they’re not speaking the truth.”

  “The Children’s Hour,” said Primrose.

  “Come on, Charles,” Jess cried. “Or shall we try something else? I’ll tell you what — let’s play Racing Demon!”

  Banks and Olliver were loud in their acclamations at this suggestion.

  “This table won’t be large enough, though. Shall we go into the dining-room?”

  “No,” said Lady Arbell, “it’s too cold, and besides, I think Ivy laid the table before she went out. Four of you can play at this table all right.”

  She got up and moved towards the fire.

  “Take my place, Captain Sedgewick. If you like Racing Demon?”

  “It’s my favourite sport.”

  “Play instead of me, Lady Arbell,” urged Jack Olliver.

  Jess interposed.

  “It’s all right. Mummie really isn’t a Racing Demon fan. She almost always loses, because she has a complex about manners.”

  “You can’t afford manners for Racing Demon,” agreed Colonel Lonergan. He smiled at his hostess.

  Jess went to a cupboard, pulled out a drawer and produced several battered packs of cards.

  Sedgewick looked at Primrose.

  “Playing?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  He went over to the table, and Lonergan at the same moment got up from his chair.

  Sedgewick sketched a polite protest.

  “All right, Charles. You carry on.”

  The Colonel, like Lady Arbell, had moved over to the fire.

  He was standing, looking down at his hostess.

  Jess and the subalterns were flicking over the cards, counting the number in each dog’s-eared and discoloured pack, and explaining to one another the rules by which the game should be played.

  Charles Sedgewick, lightly stroking his small red moustache, looked from Jess to her sister, from Primrose to the man and woman over the fire, — so much older — of whom one was his superior officer and the other a slender, faded creature with greying hair, into whose house the fortune of war had taken him.