Valentine waved to them, and they smiled and nodded at her in return.
“Is that your work-party?”
“Yes. They’re mostly farmers’ wives, and one or two of the tradespeople. The two girls on bicycles are the doctor’s daughters. They come very regularly, although they’re terribly busy, both of them.”
“Any others?”
“A neighbour of ours, Lady Fields, who lives in rather a nice house on the other side of the hill. She’s got a P.G. with her, now — a Mrs. Dalwood whose husband is abroad — and she generally brings her.”
“It’s good of you to have them.”
It seemed to Valentine that Lonergan was purposely seeking to keep any inflection out of his deep and musical voice, and the thought brought with it the conviction that he felt bewildered, and out of sympathy with the limited and parochial futilities that made up so much of her life.
“Do you think it’s all very useless?” she suggested rather timidly.
“Darling, no. It’s not that. It’s just that I don’t understand. I’ve never seen that kind of life. It’s one of the things that frightens me — all these interests and responsibilities that you’ve built up for yourself in the years. Will I ever be able to understand them?”
“Won’t you, Rory?”
“Ah, I will. You’ll make me understand everything. We’ve got to be together, always, for whatever time may be left to us. We’ll find a way.”
The warmth and colour had come back to his voice again, and his eyes smiled at her.
Her love flamed within her, responding to his mercurial ardour. But the parting words that they exchanged on the steps of Coombe, although they chimed like bells in her consciousness all the afternoon, could only partly drown the echo of his earlier words:
“It’s just that I don’t understand. I’ve never seen that kind of life. It’s one of the things that frightens me….”
The cutting-out, the stitching and folding, had all taken place to the customary accompaniment of disconnected conversation that always circled round the same topics: the war, news of those who were on active service, and domestic difficulties at home.
At four o’clock Madeleine brought in coffee and biscuits, and the workers, as usual, protested and exclaimed, and then praised the coffee that had, they knew, been made by Madeleine. They all exchanged experiences over the difficulty of obtaining this or that commodity.
Presently they were all gone.
Valentine went round the house to see whether the black-out had been properly done. In Lonergan’s room she paused for an instant.
He had brought scarcely any personal possessions, and she felt sure that he owned very few. There were no photographs and only two or three books, all of them old and shabby-looking, neatly stacked on the bedside table.
Shall we ever share an intimate, everyday life together? thought Valentine.
She went away, to the other rooms, with the question still unanswered in her mind.
He’s an artist, she thought, and a man of forty-eight who’s lived his own sort of life always. He’s afraid that I should want him to adapt himself to mine. And yet he’s afraid, too, that I could never fit into his. Perhaps I never could. But I love him so. I’d give up anything in the world for him. Only that isn’t any good. A true companionship can’t be founded on a one-sided relinquishment. Not the kind of companionship that Rory and I were meant to have. He said,” We’ll find a way.” How can we?
The Red Room had been got ready. There was even a coal fire burning in the grate, and Jess had placed chrysanthemums on the dressing-table.
With the two officers’ rooms already filled, only a very small bedroom that faced north had been available for Venetia’s Hughie Spurway.
All the rooms in the house would be occupied, thought Valentine.
It was past six o’clock when the sound of a motor horn roused the two dogs to frenzied barking, the General to shouted maledictions at them both, and Jess to striding, slamming activity at the front door.
Valentine, already in her soft, shabby, ageless black dress, waited by the fire. Her slim fingers automatically disentangled the long silken fringes of the Chinese shawl caught in the back of her chair.
She already felt faintly nervous. Venetia’s flawless armour of self-confidence, her complete non-recognition of any standards other than her own, had always frightened Valentine. Humphrey, neither liking nor disliking his only sister, had never minded them in the least. He had, indeed, had something of the same impenetrable complacency in his own character but in him it had been tempered by more kindliness and less astuteness.
But, as usual, when Venetia came into the hall and was greeted by her sister-in-law, Valentine was primarily struck by her beauty.
Impossible to say of Venetia Rockingham at fifty-one: She is still a pretty woman. Hers was the timeless beauty ensured by small and perfectly-formed bones, brilliant and deeply-set dark eyes beneath a broad, white brow, and a shapely nose and mouth that recalled certain portraits of the Umbrian school of painting in their mingling of sensuality, warmth and an arrogance that yet contrived to be dignified.
The pale-gold of her hair showed no trace of artifice, and if the golden gloss that Valentine had admired twenty-five years earlier had long since faded, the soft, unlustrous waves now framing the clearly - moulded, classically-spaced features only served to emphasize Venetia’s ageless loveliness.
The slim lines of her figure possessed all the fluidity and grace that suggest youth, whilst actually far more often achieved by the poise of maturity and the assurance derived from wealth, beautiful clothes and the ability to wear them without self-consciousness.
She was followed into the hall by Hughie Spurway.
At a first glance, it was possible only to note that he undoubtedly belonged to the group so often and so angrily defined before the war by General Levallois as “Venetia’s pansies”. He was large-eyed, haggard, good-looking, in spite of prematurely thinning dark hair, but with all the nervous and agitating mannerisms of the neurotic.
“Darling, it’s too angelic of you to have us like this,” Lady Rockingham cried. “How are you? Reggie — lovely to see you again. Where’s darling Primrose? Hughie, you know Primrose of course. This is her mother, Lady Arbell, who was a friend of your mother’s somewhere in the dark ages when they were infants and I was already an elderly married woman. Reggie, this is Hughie Spurway — General Levallois.”
Her manner and vocabulary were, strangely, still those of the Edwardian hostess.
Valentine always felt that it was really that elaborate social artificiality of Venetia’s that, unknown to herself, and in spite of the almost transatlantic modernity with which she conducted the machinery of existence, divorced her irrevocably from youth.
Jess was looking at her aunt with candid and evident appraisement of her dark, swinging furs, her double row of pearls, the R.A.F. diamond and platinum badge pinned onto her slim-lined black coat, her sheer, palest grey silk stockings, and squared, low-heeled suède shoes.
Hughie Spurway, his black brows knotted into a frown of distress, stooped to pat the spaniel. Sally immediately bared her teeth and growled.
“Shut up, Sally,” said the General, pushing her with his foot.
“She’s frightfully old,” Jess explained, “but she isn’t bad-tempered as a rule. Do you like dogs?”
“Yes. Yes. Very much,” said the young man uncon-vincingly. “At least, I don’t really know frightfully much about them. I know more about cats.”
“Cats are all right,” said Jess encouragingly, if without much enthusiasm.
The General said that cats were selfish, sneaking, unfriendly creatures — you never knew where to have them — and that the stupidest dog on earth had more brains than any cat that ever walked the tiles.
At this, Hughie Spurway looked more distressed than ever, as though convicted of having said the wrong thing.
Valentine smiled at him, asked him to sit down, and said that she
, too, was very fond of cats and didn’t at all agree with her brother’s estimate of them.
Relaxing very slightly, the young man took his seat beside her and, clinging to the topic as to a spar in a tempestuous sea, talked about cats.
Valentine felt that any attempt to start a fresh theme would at once throw him off his balance again and she continued the interchange long after it seemed to her that the last possible word about cats had been said.
Part of her attention was free to focus itself on Venetia, giving General Levallois an account of the afternoon’s meeting in Bristol, of which all the implications served to prove that it would have been of a wholly disastrous tepidity but for the galvanizing effect of Venetia’s own speech.
“What did you talk about?” Jess enquired.
Venetia said that she had talked about the progress of the war.
“Oh,” said Jess. “When’s it going to end?” She seemed to be making the enquiry quite without irony.
“Rubbish,” said the General.
“Darling, if one knew that, one would be the most popular speaker on any platform in England, not excepting Winston,” declared Lady Rockingham. “Instead of having to address three old ladies and a couple of centenarians in a draughty parish hall, as too, too often happens to one. Charlie simply can’t bear it, when I tell him about some of my meetings, but I feel these provincial places simply must have speakers, and it’s the one thing I can do, don’t you know what I mean?”
“You sit on millions of committees,” Jess pointed out — but with a coldness in her voice that Valentine recognized. “How are Michael and Nicky, aunt Venetia?”
At the mention of the two young Service men, Venetia’s sons, the tenuous thread of composure that the conversation about cats had spun round Valentine and Hughie Spurway seemed to quiver and then break altogether.
He looked round, faltered in the midst of his halting eulogy of Siamese kittens, and the look of misery in his haunted dark eyes deepened.
Valentine had to remind herself, from sheer compassion, that he probably, and fortunately, had no idea of the far too great expressiveness of his own face.
“Michael is still at Windsor, one’s thankful to say, and gets up to London quite often, don’t you know what I mean. Nicky can’t tell us exactly where he is but one’s sure it’s Palestine. He dropped some terribly broad hint in a letter to Charlie about being able to see the Mount of Olives from where he was writing. He and Charlie’s cousin, the Eric Camerons’ boy, met the other day, and we all think it was in Jerusalem.”
“What’s Eric Cameron doing nowadays?” enquired the General, interested.
This was the kind of conversation, Valentine remembered, that he liked and understood, and to which he had once been accustomed. Conversation into which entered names that he knew, and references that he could identify without having to think about it. The slang, elliptical interchange of assertion and counter-assertion between the young irritated and puzzled him, and he only cared to speak of politics, either national or international, with men whose views coincided with his own. Nowadays, he seldom indeed met with such men.
Venetia, with Debrett at her fingers’ ends and in-innumerable pieces of inside information to impart about the conduct of the war, the state of Germany and the opinions of President Roosevelt, was suiting him exactly.
Valentine wondered, as she had wondered all day at intervals, what Rory would feel about Venetia and Venetia’s fluency, that took so much for granted in her listeners.
She presently heard Jess announce, as though in extension of her thought:
“You know we’ve got two officers billeted here? A Colonel and a Captain. The Colonel is Irish, his name is Lonergan, and he’s an absolute smasher. Quite old, but terribly glamorous still. You’ll simply adore him. He says ‘will’ instead of ’shall’ every single time. I’ve noticed it particularly, and it’s definitely rather wizard.”
Valentine and Lady Rockingham both laughed, and the General said: “He’s not a bad chap, except for being Irish. I hope I’m not a man who’s in any way prejudiced, but I’m bound to say I’ve very little use for the Irish. You never know where to have them.”
“Is the other one Irish too?”
“Oh no,” said Jess. “He’s frightfully good value, too. We’re really awfully lucky. His name is Charles and he’s got red hair, which I loathe personally, but I must say he gets away with it.”
Valentine waited for her sister-in-law to ask:
“Charles who?”
She did so.
“Sedgewick, but no link anywhere so far as I know,” said the General rather gloomily. “It’s a North Country name, but this lad is a Londoner pure and simple.”
“When are we going to see them?” Lady Rockingham asked lightly. “And where’s darling Primrose?”
“Primrose has been in a most filthy temper all day, I don’t know why, and she’s been soaking in the bath ever since tea because the water happens to be boiling hot, and I suppose,” Jess said, “there won’t be a drop left for anybody else.”
“Good God,” said General Levallois.
Valentine stood up.
“Wouldn’t you like to see your room, Venetia? Mr. Spurway, I hope you won’t mind rather cramped quarters, but, with Colonel Lonergan and Captain Sedge wick here and Primrose at home, we’ve only got two spare rooms available.”
“I’m afraid I’m a frightful nuisance,” said Hughie Spurway resentfully.
“Indeed you’re not.”
She led the way upstairs.
They met Primrose coming down, wearing her long periwinkle-blue house-coat.
Valentine was immediately conscious that a violent psychic disturbance had assailed Hughie Spurway, and she hoped that Primrose would greet him with some kindness.
Venetia exclaimed: “Darling, it’s simply ages since I saw you! What an amusing way of doing your hair! New, isn’t it?”
Primrose averted her face as far as possible from the contact imposed upon her by her aunt’s embrace and said something indistinct.
She looked neither at Venetia nor at her mother, but her eyes rested for an instant coldly and appraisingly on Hughie Spurway.
“Look who’s here,” she drawled.
He put out his hand, but she seemed not to see it.
He said, “Hallo, my dear, how are you?” very faintly.
Primrose had already turned aside and was walking downstairs.
Valentine opened the door of the Red Room and said:
“You know where you are, Venetia. I’ll show Mr. Spurway his room, and then come and see if you’ve got everything you need.”
XII
In the spring of nineteen hundred and forty-one — nearly a year earlier — Hughie Spurway had for a few weeks been Primrose’s lover. Time out of mind he had asked himself, as he was asking himself now, why he could not forget her, or hate her for her cruelty, and fall in love with someone who might be kind and gentle and might even love him in return.
Then he reminded himself, with a savage pleasure in self-torture, that it was scarcely probable that any woman would ever love him. The thought had been familiar to him ever since the terrifying day in his twelfth year when he had seen his mother’s white, sick face turned towards him after reading a letter from his headmaster. She had told him, then, why she had left his father.
She had two other boys, to make up to her for Hughie. He had sought refuge in that thought even at twelve years old, and even in the blind despair and self-disgust that had driven him into lying continuously to her and to the grave, compassionate priests and doctors to whom she had sent him. None of them had, it seemed to him, done much to help him. None of them had given any real answer to his question: Why, why should it be me? My brothers are not like this. Why am I different?
He had crawled, like something with a mortal wound, through the years of adolescence, its normal pains intensified, deprived of its normal joys. In the end, he had come to take a kind of pleasure in feeling h
imself an outcast, in deliberately permitting his loss of self-respect to encroach further and further into his life.
Later on, there had been brief unrelated periods of a feverish happiness that he now qualified as illusory. They had ended, all of them, with more or less of violence and, exaggerating his own inadequacies, he told himself that it was only his perpetual fears and jealousies and suspicions that had brought about these ruptures.
He had fallen in love with Primrose at a party when he had taken too much to drink and found himself sufficiently released to talk with freedom about himself and his miseries, and she had listened and had seemed to him kind. He had found the courage to ask her if she would come back to his flat with him that night and she had, without demur, agreed.
The brief period that followed had seemed to Hughie like the opening of a new life, but when he asked Primrose if she would marry him she had unhesitatingly said no and he had passed almost at once into the old familiar region of nightmare jealousies and scenes of frenzied appeals and demands and reproaches.
It was always he who had forced them upon Primrose in the very teeth of his own agonized knowledge that they served only to antagonize her and cause her to despise him.
One day she told him, with a deliberate calm that carried instant conviction, that she had only listened to him and allowed him to take her home at their first meeting because she, too, had been drinking and had not really known what she was doing. It had meant nothing at all to her.
Hughie heard her with a sense of doom that found its only expression in hysterical threats of suicide that she, as well as he, knew to be theatrical and unreal.
Even his passion for Primrose was, he sometimes thought, unreal — although it dominated his days and his nights and throve insanely under the lash of her open contempt for his manifestations of it.
Yet she continued to see him, to make use of him and occasionally to throw him a word of mock tenderness.
He cursed himself now, because he had manœuvred for this way of seeing her again, knowing that Lady Rockingham was amused and would make a good story out of it, and that Primrose would despise him more than ever. Would she even give him a chance of talking to her alone? She had been on her way downstairs when they met — perhaps he could find her by herself now, if he made haste.
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