“Why?” coldly asked Primrose. “I’m damned sick of all this pretending and keeping on the surface and corps diplomatique rubbish. Why shouldn’t I be rude to Rory if I feel like it, and why shouldn’t he answer back? I feel like having one hell of a row this evening.”
General Levallois pulled himself up onto his feet and reached for his sticks.
“Well, I don’t, and if your mother and Colonel Lonergan take my advice they’ll leave you to have your row by yourself. Good-night, Val. You can send me up a glass of brandy with Madeleine’s drink to the sitting-room. ’Night, Colonel.”
“Good-night, sir.”
The General stumped away upstairs.
Shrieks of laughter, subdued by distance, came from beyond the red baize door, and the barking of dogs.
“Well, that’s that,” said Primrose. “Frightfully characteristic and old-school-tie and everything, isn’t he? Where do we go from here?”
Lonergan was still gazing at Valentine. Her eyes were quiet, and her hand covered her mouth.
“For God’s sake, Primrose,” he said, “you’ve no need to go on like this, girl. Why do you have to spoil the party for everyone?”
Primrose shrugged her shoulders.
“You’re very social-minded all of a sudden. How about finishing the fight in your office, if you’re so anxious not to upset anybody?”
Valentine rose.
“Is the fire still burning in there?”
Lonergan accepted her dismissal gravely.
“It should be. We can go there, if that’s what you wish.”
“It’s what I wish,” said Primrose.
She walked away into the breakfast-room and they heard the click of the electric light switch as she turned it on.
Lonergan remained behind.
He could see Valentine’s mouth now, and the expression of it told him, as he had expected, more than her guarded eyes had done.
“What’s the matter?” he asked bluntly.
“With Primrose? I don’t know.”
“Not Primrose. You.”
She hesitated so long before speaking that he thought she was not going to reply at all.
At last she said:
“I’m sorry she’s being so difficult. It’s partly because of me, I think. I mean — Primrose doesn’t like me, and that shows her at her worst. I expect you know how very different the real Primrose can be.”
“Damn Primrose,” said Lonergan.
Her face, at that, showed nothing but pure astonishment.
The sound of loud, laughing young voices and rapidly approaching feet reached them.
“I must talk to you,” Lonergan said wildly and urgently. “I don’t know what it is you’re thinking — it may have been true once but it isn’t any longer — God, what a cad I sound! — but don’t you see, it isn’t Primrose that matters, in the very least? It’s you.”
Valentine flushed deeply, like a young girl.
“I thought—” she said, and stopped.
“They think the pantry’s marvellous!” hilariously announced Jess, bursting in with her train. “Jack says his mother would die if she had such a frightful sink to wash up at!”
“It’s enough to break any woman’s back.”
“Jack, where are your manners and who asked your opinion of the sink anyway?” shouted young Banks.
They were indeed feeling at home and happy. Sedgewick put down glasses.
“Who’s this mysterious French Madeleine of yours?” he asked Jess.
Valentine answered him.
“Madeleine’s an old French maid of my mother’s. She’s been with us for years. She’s in her sitting-room upstairs. Jess, take the whole tray if you’re all going. Uncle Reggie wants a glass of brandy.”
“Mummie, do you always remember not to say ‘another’? I never do. Shall we all have a drink upstairs?” asked Jess collectively of her escort.
Sedgewick picked up the tray.
“Isn’t Primrose coming?”
“Not at the minute,” Valentine said. “I daresay she’ll come up later.”
“No I shan’t,” said the voice of Primrose from the doorway of the office. “You can bring me a brandy in here, Rory.”
Silently Lonergan poured out brandy into two glasses.
He carried them into the other room and Primrose shut the door.
Lonergan placed his glasses carefully on the desk and then turned round.
They stood facing one another.
“Well?” asked Primrose. “Say it, for God’s sake. Don’t just look at me as if I were a cup of cold poison. If anyone’s got a grievance, it’s me — not you.”
“What grievance?”
“What grievance!” she mimicked scornfully. “Come on, Rory, let’s have it out. If we’re going on like this, I may as well go back to London to-morrow. Give me that drink, will you?”
He handed her the glass.
“Why didn’t you bring the decanter? One glass isn’t any good to anybody in a crisis.”
“We’ll have to get through this crisis without drink, my girl. Drink never settled anything yet.”
“I couldn’t disagree more. What on earth’s the matter, Rory?”
“Let’s sit down to it,” suggested Lonergan. He moved towards the swivel chair that stood in front of the desk.
“Here,” said Primrose in a stifled voice. She pushed him into die big armchair near the fire and threw herself onto his knee, curling herself against him with a fluid, boneless ease that made her seem, for all her length of limb, small and supple as a child.
Instinctively his arms closed round her.
“That’s better,” muttered Primrose, her voice stifled against his shoulder.
“Darling, this isn’t any use, you know. We aren’t getting anywhere. And truly, I’m in a terrible jam and I’m hating myself for having got into it and, still more, for having got you into it.”
“I’m in no jam whatever. You and I started a thing, and as far as I know we were both getting quite a lot of fun out of it till you arrived here, and came over all Sir Galahad or whatever his name was. Is it because I’m not at my best and brightest in the old home atmosphere? If you remember, I warned you I shouldn’t be.”
“You did.”
“Do I turn your stomach all of a sudden or something?”
“No. I think you’re damned attractive, sexually, just as I always have.”
Primrose raised her mouth to his and kissed him long and hard.
Then she said, most unexpectedly:
“Look here — I’m sorry I was a pig to you at supper. I know I was, but this place gets on my nerves.”
He was touched, as he always was by her shattering honesty.
“God, Primrose, you make me feel like the hound of all the ages when you say a generous thing like that. I don’t care what dog’s abuse you hand out to me, as well you know, when we’re by ourselves. But with those lads there—”
“Oh, Lord, that’s what mummie said. I could have screamed when she did that fool trick of dropping her glass accidentally-on-purpose in the hall. Like something in an Edwardian drawing-room comedy, being all diplomatic and saving-the-situation-like.”
“She did save it.”
“If you ask me, I think she made a complete fool of herself.”
Lonergan moved involuntarily.
“All right, you needn’t kick me into the fire. I suppose your mother-complex is too much for your common sense.”
“I certainly don’t admire the way you speak to, or of, your mother. In fact, I think the way you behave to her altogether is quite disgusting.”
“Well, need it matter? I mean, I daresay there are lots of ways in which we don’t admire one another — I don’t mind telling you that you’re far from perfect yourself— but I can’t see that it need interfere with us.”
“Darling, I’m afraid I can. You’ve always held it against me that I’m a sentimentalist, and you’ve been perfectly right. I’m too much of a sent
imentalist not to want to love, as well as be in love.”
Primrose sat upright and gazed at him incredulously. Her dense, blue-green eyes expressed wrath and contempt rather than pain.
“You aren’t trying to tell me that it’s all off, I suppose?”
Lonergan drew a long breath and spoke with the courage of desperation.
“I’m afraid that’s exactly it, my dear. You can’t hate me more than I hate myself.”
“You’ll have to give me a lot better reason,” said Primrose slowly. “After all, I’m not a fool. We both knew perfectly well, when the whole thing started, that we weren’t out for a grande passion. It’s what I said in the car coming down, Rory. There’s somebody else.”
“Very well. There is. Only it’s not the way you think.”
“I don’t know what I think. Look here, Rory, I’d a lot rather you came into the open about this.”
She was being at her best — straightforward, adopting no pose, and ready to face anything. Lonergan recognized it instandy, and as instandy realized that nothing could make his own dilemma harder. Well, it was his own fault. He’d let himself be rushed into this affair with a girl young enough to be his daughter simply because she had appealed to his sensuality and he had lacked the moral courage to rebuff the blatant advances with which she had assaulted him.
At least, this time it was not he who had made the assault, who had pursued and persuaded and compelled into love a woman whom he had temporarily found seductive and from whom he had sought the romantically perfect relationship that he had only found with Laurence, and which, in the inmost depths of his heart, he never really expected to find again. It had always been he, unreasonably disappointed and nervously exasperated, who had broken up the relationship, unable to endure its falsity or to keep up its pretences.
With Primrose, he had felt secure because she openly derided romantic love and they had admittedly embarked on their affair without protestations of love or fidelity on either side. She had told him that he was not her first lover, and would certainly not be her last, and she had never wanted any but physical love-making with him.
Even now, he told himself with relief that it was her vanity she was trying to protect, not her heart.
She deserved the truth and he — in a different sense — deserved the pain and discomfiture of making her accept it.
“My dear, you’ve been wonderful to me and I’ll never forget it. But I warned you what I was, at the very beginning. Utterly fickle and unreliable, always landing myself into caddish situations and — what you loathe most — an incurable sentimentalist. It’s got to be more than just the physical relationship, with me, if it’s to last at all.”
“You knew all that at the beginning, and so did I,” Primrose remarked coldly. “You can’t pull that stuff now, Rory. Besides, you’ve just told me there’s somebody else. Who is she?”
“Does that matter?”
“Is she in love with you?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t asked her.”
“But you’re going to?”
“I am. Look, Primrose, you’ve told me you’d rather I came into the open. I’ll try. This — thing — encounter — call it anything you like — is something that’s almost impossible to explain. I can only say that I do honestly believe it’s real, and important, and may alter the whole of life. I didn’t know it was going to happen, and she didn’t either. But it has happened, and if it’s what I believe it to be — everything else is out.”
It was said.
Sick with self-disgust, Lonergan stopped speaking.
Primrose hadn’t moved.
Then she began to laugh, disconcerting him utterly.
“I suppose this is Keltic romance or something. Well, it leaves me stone cold, because I simply don’t understand it. All it boils down to, so far as I can see, is that you’ve fallen for another woman and you want to persuade yourself that you’ve never really loved anybody else before, and never will again. But I should like to know how often you’ve said and thought that, in the last ten years? Or twenty, for all I know.”
“All right. You’re entided to say all that. I’m not going to argue. I can only tell you the thing as I see it.”
“But Rory, it doesn’t make sense! You’ve said yourself that nothing has happened, yet. I don’t know what this girl can give you that I can’t, but for the moment you’re here, and I’m here, and — well, what’s the odds anyway?”
He understood that she was prepared to overlook altogether what she took to be his imaginative interest in another woman, for the term of her stay at Coombe.
He shook his head.
“It’s no good, Primrose.”
He hoped she might be angered by his gracelessness, but instead she put her arms round his neck.
“You don’t deserve it, but I’ve got fond of you,” she said, low and indistincdy, her face against his.
“Primrose!”
Pity, remorse, affection, all seemed to be tearing him to pieces.
She pressed herself against him and he kissed her yellow curls and half-hidden face.
“Don’t be a fool, Rory darling. We’re in the middle of this god-awful war that may land any of us anywhere at any moment, and there honesdy isn’t time to throw fits about true love and all the rest of it. Let’s take what we can while we can.”
He had never felt her nearer to him, for he had never felt her to be more completely sincere. She was generous, too, for she might well have reproached him — as indeed he wished that she would. But she had accepted what he said, although without understanding it, and had not even pressed home the inevitable questions.
And she had, most uncharacteristically, admitted that she had grown fond of him.
Rory, in despair, could only groan “Primrose!” as he kissed her again and again.
“Is it all right, pet?” she muttered.
“No, darling, it is not. I think you’re wonderful, but I can’t be your lover any more.”
Primrose disengaged herself and stood up.
“I think you’re a dam’ fool, that’s all. I’ve told you once, in plain English, that I’m ready to go on as we are for this week. After all, it’s what I came down here for, isn’t it? But I certainly shan’t say it a second time. It’s now or never, Rory.”
“Then, my dear, it’s never.”
She turned rather white but answered coolly.
“Okay. Now we know where we are. I shall probably go back to London to-morrow as I suppose you’re stuck here now — thanks to my own efforts, which seems a bit ironical — and I hope this marvellous new love of yours gives you the hell you deserve.”
She turned and went to the door.
As she opened it the shrill note of the telephone-bell rang through the house.
They heard someone crossing the hall to go and answer it, and both automatically moved forward and then stood waiting, not looking at each other.
Valentine came towards them, from the door that concealed both the telephone and the entrance to the downstairs lavatory.
“It’s a London call for you, Primrose.”
“Okay.”
Valentine pushed the silvered lock of hair away from her forehead. She looked tired and nervous and Lonergan felt a passionate desire to reassure and comfort her.
“What’s Jess done with the British Army?” he asked, instinctively putting before her the recollection of so much youth and normality.
“They’re still upstairs, I suppose, with Madeleine. Unless they’ve all gone to the schoolroom — but I hope not, it’s so cold in there.”
There was an unusual note of nervousness in her voice, and he saw her tired eyes and mouth.
“I’d like to talk to you, if I may,” he said abruptly. “Are you too tired, now?”
“No, but haven’t you and Primrose — aren’t you talking to her?”
“We’ve said all we have to say. She was just going.”
“I thought she came out because she heard the
telephone. It’s nearly always for her.”
“Yes, I see.”
The words fell from their lips, meaningless for both of them.
Other words were crowding Lonergan’s mind and causing his heart to thud heavily against his side.
He could hear Valentine’s quickly-drawn breathing.
“I think I must go,” she said at last. “I ought to see about—”
Her voice trailed away into silence.
Lonergan stepped forward quickly and took both her hands.
“Ah, don’t go. Valentine, don’t ever go away. I love you so much.”
He saw, with shattering clarity, the look of pure, incredulous happiness that illuminated her face on the instant as she gazed full at him.
“But do you?” she asked in a breathless, shaken voice. “Are you sure?”
Exultant joy and relief rushed over him.
“It’s a pity I wouldn’t be sure, when we fell in love all those years ago in the Pincio Gardens! Darling, darling — do you love me too?”
“Yes.”
They looked at one another as though not daring to move for fear of breaking a spell.
Then she said his name, gendy and lingeringly as if experimenting with her right to say it.
“Rory.”
“Valentine! Love.”
He drew her towards him, forgetting everything except her nearness, and said to her — reverting unaware to the long-disused idiom of his youth:
“Ah — c’mon while I tell you!”
IX
Sloping her length against the wall, a cigarette in one hand and the telephone-receiver in the other, Primrose drawled rejoinders into the mouthpiece, replying to the nervous, high-pitched tones that reached her from a disembodied masculine voice in London.
“Primrose, are you all right? Are you having a decent rest?”
“I’m okay.”
“Are you — are you liking it better than you expected? Anyone with you besides family?”
Primrose knew what that too casual-seeming enquiry meant. Jealous fool, she thought, made furious as she always was at a hint that anyone — and in particular Hughie Spurway — had any claim upon her.
“We’ve got some Army chaps billeted here,” she said coolly. “Colonels and what-have-you. So that’s cheering things up a bit.”
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