“Is Lonergan one of them?”
“He is, my pet. I’d forgotten you knew him.”
“I met him when you did. Look here, Primrose, I really rang up — well, partly to hear your voice, and partly because I’ve got a man to see at Plymouth and I wondered if I could meet you anywhere. I could drive you back to London if you liked.”
“When?”
“I can make my dates fit in with yours.”
She could hear the hysterical eagerness in Hughie Spurway’s voice. It irritated her, just as it had always irritated her ever since she had realized, nearly a year ago, that he had fallen frenziedly in love with her and that the worse she treated him, the more deeply fixed his infatuation became.
“Look here, Hughie, I’ll have to let you know. ‘S’matter of fact, I’ve rather been debating getting back to London.”
“I can come and get you any day you like.”
“For the matter of that, I can take a train.”
“As you say, of course, but travelling’s pretty foul, this weather. Primrose, have you had any letters from me?”
“Plenty.”
“I know you loathe writing, my sweet, but you did say you would.”
“Did I?”
“God, Primrose, why do you say you’ll do a thing and then you never do? You don’t know what it does to me.”
“Don’t be a fool. Look, I’m going to ring off. You’ll be ruined.”
“I’m ruined already. But it’s as you say. Only let me know which day to come, because I must let the Plymouth people know.”
“Okay. If you don’t hear, you’ll know I can’t make it.”
“Primrose, for God’s sake — I’ve got to see you.”
“You will, when I get back.”
“When can you dine with me? Can’t we fix an evening now? I want to talk to you. I can’t go on like this.”
His voice held the desperate note that Primrose at once dreaded and despised.
“Forget it, Hughie. I loathe hysterics, as you know — they make me sick. I’m going to ring off.”
“No —wait. Don’t. I’ve got to—”
“’Night, Hughie.” She hesitated for a second and added: “Good-night, pet.”
Then she quickly replaced the receiver.
Hughie had rung up for nothing really. He just wanted to make the same old scene, over and over again.
He couldn’t understand, apparently, that when one was through with a thing, one was through with it. Nothing could bring it to life again.
God, thought Primrose wearily, I suppose that’s what Rory feels about us — him and me. Funny, when you come to think of it, because I’ve always been the one who got sick of it first, before.
Her cigarette finished, she threw it on the tiled floor and stamped it out.
The telephone bell rang again.
That was Hughie. He always did that. If she answered, he’d say that he’d simply got to hear her voice again — he couldn’t leave it at that — he must speak to her.
But she wasn’t going to answer.
Hughie was neurotic, and exacting and jealous, and hopelessly on her nerves. She wished she’d told him to get himself released from his B.B.C. job and go into one of the Services. If he did wangle a journey to Plymouth and she let him drive her back to London, she’d say just exactly that to him, thought Primrose savagely.
Weary, cold and exasperated she leaned against the wall, furious with herself as well as with Hughie Spurway, and anxious to believe that she was still more furious with Lonergan for letting her down.
And who the devil was this new girl of his?
Primrose recalled the names of girls whom they both knew, but her acquaintance with Lonergan was so recent that she could only think of one or two.
It’s someone I don’t know, she decided. Somebody either in Bloomsbury, who goes in for being artistic, or some awful woman in the suburbs that he’s fallen for without any reason whatever. Just one of those things. And he’s such a fool, he’s gone off the deep end and taken it as deadly serious. God, he might even marry her — unless she’s got a husband who won’t divorce her. Though for all I know, he’s married already — why not? He’s exactly the kind of lunatic who’d marry at twenty and then walk out and never pull himself together and get rid of his wife. Artists and such. … I’m well out of it.
She knew she didn’t believe that, even while she tried to think it. Rory Lonergan had attracted her at sight, and she found his intelligence in love-making agreeable and exciting. To her, it furnished quite a new experience. It pleased her, also, that he was articulate and told her things about herself that were never stereotyped and that made her, she thought, sound nicer than she really was.
She reflected drearily: If Rory isn’t married, perhaps that’s why he’s dropped me. He wants to marry this bitch whoever she is. He said: If it’s what I believe it to be — everything else is out. I wish I’d made him tell me. I still can. I needn’t go back to London to-morrow. In fact, I don’t actually want to, if he’s here. I suppose I’m bats, but that’s the way I feel.
Amazed, and angry with herself as well as with Lonergan, Primrose still stood in the cold little cupboard of a room, contemplating without seeing them the polished surfaces of her pointed nails.
She had never before felt so undecided, so profoundly at a loss.
She was unable even to decide whether she would or would not return to London next day
At last she walked away, still undetermined, and went back to the hall.
Jess and the soldiers were there, Banks and Olliver regretfully protesting that the time had come for them to leave.
“They’ve thought up a lovely plan for keeping us all out of mischief to-morrow,” explained Banks gloomily, “and it begins at five in the morning.”
“We rely on you, Jess, to see that Charles leaves this house in good time,” Jack Olliver added.
“Oh, is he in it too?”
“He’s in it too.”
“It being a sopping wet ditch on the moors, presumably,” said Sedgewick.
“The moors! You’ll have to go miles!”
“How right you are.”
Jess took her two young men to the hall door, whistling to the puppy.
“Come on, aunt Sophy!”
Primrose saw that only Charles Sedgewick was really aware of her presence. He had looked once in her direction, quite expressionlessly, out of sharp, bright, red-brown eyes.
“Is Rory in his office?” she asked, instinctively showing him that she had another man in whom to be interested.
“Probably. He generally works late. But as a matter of fact I’ve not seen him since we came down.”
“Where’s mummie, Primrose? They want to say goodbye and thank you for having me, like they ought,” Jess said.
“I haven’t the slightest.”
“I’ll say it for you,” Jess volunteered to the subalterns. “Or she may come when she hears the motor-bike starting up.”
“We shall be half-way down the drive by then. We go like the wind.”
Jess threw open the door and a gust of cold air swept in.
“Gosh! It’s suddenly got freezing again. How utterly dim!”
“Dim is the word all right,” called out the voice of Olliver, as they moved out into the darkness and Jess let the glass doors swing behind them.
They did not shut out the abrupt, volcanic noises of the motor-bicycle, as the engine started, stopped, started and stopped again.
“What a row,” Primrose muttered.
Sedgewick said:
“Shall I go and give them a shove?” and looked again at Primrose.
The door of the little breakfast-room opened.
Primrose saw her mother come out as well as Lonergan.
“They wanted to say good-night, Lady Arbell,” Sedgewick politely explained.
“I didn’t know they were going so soon.”
“They’re not gone yet, by the sound of it,” Lonergan obse
rved.
He moved, just behind his hostess, to the front door.
“Keep the glass doors shut, Primrose,” said her mother, “or the light will show when we open the hall door.”
Primrose glanced at her quickly, catching a new note in her voice.
Mummie simply never told her to do things, like that — she knew better. One wasn’t Jess, after all.
But she shut the glass doors, retiring into the hall, and found that Sedgewick had remained with her.
“A very jolly evening,” said the Captain, pensively rather than enthusiastically.
“Oh yeah? Well, you’ve seen us all now. How do you think you’ll be able to stand your new billet?”
“I think I’m lucky.”
“That’s frightfully polite. So long as you don’t mind no heating, and bad cooking and uncle Reggie’s grousing and grumbling, and mummie’s generally dim outlook, you’ll do fine. Jess will be off any day now and I’m probably going back to London to-morrow.”
“For all I know we may all be off ourselves tomorrow,” said Sedgewick imperturbably. “We get shoved around quite a lot.”
“I’ll say you do.”
She knelt down to warm her hands at the fire.
“Have you really got to go out on exercise at five o’clock to-morrow morning?”
“Not quite as bad as that. I want to be in camp by seven, though.”
“Is he going too?”
She indicated Lonergan with a backward jerk of the head.
“No.”
Sedgewick, after pausing a minute, asked her:
“D’you know him terribly well?”
“Fairly. Do you?”
“Not awfully. I haven’t been seconded very long. I think he’s an unusual type, rather. One wouldn’t expect an artist to make a good soldier, normally.”
“He probably wasn’t a good artist.”
Sedgewick laughed.
“He much more probably was. He’s perfectly well known as an illustrator, and I’ve seen some of his stuff. I’m no judge, but it looked okay to me.”
“Is he like most artists, struggling to support a wife and family?” Primrose said, hoping that she wasn’t overdoing the nonchalance.
“He’s not married, is he?”
They were silent as the doors swung open again.
The roar of the motor-bicycle had become inaudible.
“What fun it was,” cried Jess. “I think Buster and Jack are simply divine. Madeleine did, too. They were angelic to her.”
Primrose did not move.
So Rory wasn’t married. It was odd, because she’d have taken any bet that he was. And if not, how had he escaped it? Anyway — who cared?
She felt chilled, angry and dejected.
She fingered the stiff, tautly-twisted curls that stood out round her forehead and thought what a fool she’d been to put on that periwinkle-blue house-coat. Rory hadn’t so much as spoken of it although he was usually good at noticing things like that.
Primrose furiously, and against her will, remembered things that he had said to her and that she had coldly told him were just so much Irish blarney, but that she had enjoyed, from their very dissimilarity to the brief, slang exchanges that passed for conversation amongst her own contemporaries.
Damn Rory. He had charm and he was frightfully articulate and intelligent, and one was going to miss it all quite a lot.
Especially, thought Primrose, if there wasn’t anybody else to take his place. And there wasn’t, unless she could get something going with Charles Sedgewick.
At the thought she slewed her eyes round without moving her head and looked at him.
He’d be all right, she supposed, and he’d already noticed her, quite definitely.
Anything would be better, thought Primrose drearily, than going back to London in the cold and with no one there whom she specially wanted to be with any more.
Valentine, overwhelmingly happy, stood in the shelter of the portico and said goodbye to the subalterns, and laughed at their difficulties with the motor-bicycle and, at Jessica’s shouted request, held aunt Sophy out of the way of harm.
All the while her heart was singing and she felt lightheaded, intoxicated with the suddenness of her joy, and hardly conscious of anything that was happening.
She did not realize that it was a cold night until Lonergan, standing behind her, put a cloak round her shoulders. Then, feeling his arm encircling her, she leant back against it and bliss flooded her.
“I love you. Darling, I love you. I adore you,” he whispered, close to her ear.
“I love you, Rory.”
The noise from the engine redoubled, aunt Sophy barked and struggled, and the motor-cycle rushed away into the darkness showing only a pin-prick of light.
“Gosh, what fun it was! Where’s aunt Sophy?”
Without waiting for an answer Jess hauled the puppy towards her.
“I simply must take her for a run, black-out or no black-out. I’ll just go as far as the gate.”
Valentine felt Lonergan’s hand clasping her own closely, as though to prevent her from moving, and she stood motionless.
They heard Jessica’s footsteps on the gravel, and her voice talking to her dog, then dying away.
“My own love. Will we wait here for a little while, or is it too cold?”
“I’m not cold,” said Valentine, and she turned towards him in the dark.
The kisses that he gave her restored to her all her youth, and it was with the untouched fervour and passion of youth that she returned them.
“Darling, you’re crying!”
“I didn’t know I was. It’s because I’m so happy, — so terribly, terribly happy.”
“My darling, lovely child. So am I. Terribly happy.”
“Rory, I never knew it could be like this.”
“Nor I. Believe you me, in all the years, and all the adventures I’ve deliberately sought out — God forgive me — it’s never been like this. There’s only been one real thing in my life, until now when I’ve found you.”
“I know.”
She felt his clasp upon her grow tighter.
“You mind. You’re unhappy about that.”
Valentine was amazed, as much by the quickness of his intuition as by the ease with which he put it into words.
It was true that a pang, startling in the intensity of its pain, had struck savagely at the very centre of her being, with the recollection of Laurence.
She could only say, helplessly:
“It’s all right. I understand.”
“Ah, it isn’t all right. I know you understand, dearest — but it isn’t all right. It makes you unhappy. We’ll have to talk about it. Everything has got to be clear between us — always.”
He bent his head and his mouth found hers again and they clung to one another.
“I want to hear everything about your life, and to tell you everything about mine. When will we be able to talk to one another, love? Can’t you come and sit over the fire in the little office with me now?”
“I can do anything you like,” said Valentine unhesitatingly.
She thought dazedly of the things that she wanted to hear from him and, in her turn, to say to him.
Jess came back through the darkness, and Lonergan pushed open the doors for her.
They all went in together.
Primrose was standing over the fire by herself.
“Where’s Charles?” Jess demanded.
“Telephoning. Where on earth have you been? I shouldn’t have thought it was a night for strolling in the park.”
“Aunt Sophy and I strolled. We had to. I don’t know what mummie and Colonel Lonergan did,” returned Jess. “They just stayed in the porch.”
Primrose, who as a rule never looked at her mother, suddenly turned and looked at her now with a hard, fixed stare. Their eyes met and Valentine, from old depths of pain thus reawakened, felt herself flushing deeply and uncontrollably.
“I’m afraid that
was my fault,” said Lonergan easily. “I kept your mother standing in the cold, when I should have had more sense.”
As he spoke, he realized that neither Valentine nor Primrose had heard even the sound of his words.
They were only aware, for the moment, of themselves and of an unspoken revelation that hovered between them.
Lonergan ceased speaking abruptly and stood motionless, as though at attention.
For an instant the tension in the atmosphere seemed as if it might become unendurable. Jess opening her mouth to speak, left whatever she had to say unuttered and her mouth still half open, and stared round at them with puzzled eyes.
Once again, the code that, so many years ago, had once and for all formed the standards of Valentine Levallois, held good.
“Colonel Lonergan and I have discovered that we really did meet, years and years ago in Rome, when I was a girl,” she said calmly.
She turned to him and offered him the charming smile that curved her lips but did not reach her eyes.
“Of course I thought of it when I heard your name, but I wasn’t absolutely sure until we spoke.”
“I’d have known you anywhere,” said Rory Lonergan.
He was far less calm than she, because he was far less certain of the importance of averting a scene.
Scenes were part of Rory Lonergan’s national and personal tradition, whereas they were not part of Valentine Arbell’s at all.
She’s afraid of a show-down, flashed through Lonergan’s mind with an extraordinary mingling of tenderness, amusement and pity for her, and of shame for himself.
The fatuity of it, standing there with the reluctant, inescapable conviction pressing upon him that, if there were to be a scene, it would have been brought about by his own presence at Coombe, and his relation with each of these two women!
Charles Sedgewick came back and, like everybody else who had been forced to spend any time at the Coombe telephone, he looked extremely cold and made straight for the fire.
“We’re all fixed up for to-morrow morning, sir,” he told his Colonel. “I’ve just confirmed it.”
Lonergan nodded.
“Are you going on this bind too?” Jess asked him.
“I am not. I shall be at the Camp all day and back here some time in the evening.”
He looked at Valentine and found in her eyes the look that he wanted to see there, that recalled the young girl of the Pincio Gardens with such astonishing clarity.
Late and Soon Page 12
