Late and Soon
Page 27
Perhaps he hadn’t told her what time he would ring up.
Perhaps the old aunt, whom it was so impossible to think of as Rory’s sister, had decided that Arlette must attend the concert, and that another telephone call could be put through next day. But no—that wouldn’t do. There’d have been a message left at Kilronan post-office in that case, surely.
Valentine decided that Lonergan, in his telegram, had announced the fact of his embarkation leave and had said that he would telephone, without specifying the day or the hour. How, indeed, could he have been certain of the hour at all?
Her meaningless speculations and calculations brought Valentine into her own room, the full onslaught of the pain that awaited her still held at bay.
The clock on the landing struck five. Valentine had heard the chiming of all the hours since one o’clock.
As the last reverberation died away, another sound, remote and carefully controlled, reached her. It was that of the hall door being cautiously opened and shut again.
She knew that Lonergan had returned.
Lying open-eyed in the dark, her senses acutely sharpened, she seemed to herself able to follow all his movements accurately.
Now he had passed through the swing-doors and stopped in the hall. Conspicuous on a table at the foot of the stairs lay her transcription of Arlette’s telegram, where she had placed it, clearing everything off the little table so that he could not miss it.
He was reading it now.
There was no further sound.
She lay, expecting to hear him go down the hall again, to where the telephone was. But no movement of any kind reached her.
Valentine remained tense and motionless for what appeared to her a long while.
Presently she glanced at the illuminated face of the travelling clock, old and shabby and reliable—one of her wedding presents, she remembered—that stood in its faded blue-and-gilt folding frame next to her bedside.
Twenty minutes had gone by since she had heard the clock strike, and Rory Lonergan letting himself in at the door. The stillness was absolute.
At last it was broken.
She heard Lonergan’s step on the stairs.
He was walking slowly and with care, as though anxious to make no noise.
At the door of his room he did not stop, nor did the faint, familiar click of the turning handle reach her. He was going straight on, past his own room, to the end of the schoolroom passage where the short flight of stairs led to the top storey.
Valentine waited, sad and bewildered, but she heard nothing more.
No explanation occurred to her. She was too weary to search for one, and presently she fell asleep.
Madeleine’s knock at the door woke her.
Madeleine put down the small tea-tray by the bed and drew back the curtains. It was not quite dark, a chill dawn was breaking and a pearly grey light filtered into the room.
Valentine shivered and lay still.
Madeleine came and stood beside the bed.
“Madame,” she said softly, “the world is all white. It has been snowing.”
Old associations rushed into Valentine’s mind instantly. Her own astonished pleasure, in childhood, at the still purity of the English countryside under snow … the excited delight of Primrose as a little girl building a snowman on the lawn with Humphrey … the branches of the trees in the orchard sending up an occasional light flurry of white from snow-laden branches. All came and went in a flash and then she was fully awakened, caught into the realities of the present.
“Is it half-past seven?” she asked doubtfully.
There was a strange stillness over everything, as though Coombe had not yet emerged from the enveloping quiet of the night.
“Seven o’clock, madame—six, in reality,” answered Madeleine. “It has been snowing hard since midnight.”
She indicated the window by a gesture, but it was not yet light enough to see anything.
“It was monsieur le colonel who told me,” Madeleine said, and she fixed her great brown eyes on Valentine’s face with a compelling candour.
“Monsieur le colonel came to find me, madame, at five o’clock this morning and he gave me a letter for madame.”
She laid it on the bed, and as Valentine took it and opened it Madeleine found a pale woollen wrap and placed it over her shoulders.
With astonishment Valentine realized that she had never seen Lonergan’s handwriting before. It was heavy, as though he wrote with a thick-pointed nib, and it bore the appearance of being illegible. But she found that she could read easily the few lines that he had written.
“My Love, my own darling—I’d come to you now but that it’s the middle of the night and I mustn’t make a scandal for you at Coombe. Will you come down to me in the office as soon as you get this? I’ve been out of my mind, since leaving you last night. Nothing matters at all, except that we belong to one another. I love you utterly.”
He had signed it with his initial.
Madeleine stood at the foot of the bed.
“When madame is dressed, I will bring coffee to the little breakfast-room. It is better that everything should be arranged before anyone is downstairs. Monsieur le colonel will be there already, for I called him before coming in here. Madame will forgive me.”
“Ah, Madeleine!” said Valentine, and she smiled although tears were falling from her eyes.
“Madame perceives that I know. all. Monsieur le colonel did well, to come and find me so early this morning. He knew that I could help madame.”
She paused for a moment, and then, choosing her words with delicacy and discretion, she said:
“I think madame will find that monsieur le colonel has his car at the door. Madame will need her fur coat, if she decides to go out with him. It is waiting in the hall.”
The fur-lined grey tweed, shabby and shapeless, lay across the back of a chair when Valentine, a very few minutes later, went downstairs to find Rory Lonergan.
He was waiting for her at the foot of the stairs, his dark upturned face full of the strain and fatigue of the night.
As he saw her, all look of fatigue fled, leaving nothing but the defenceless look of love.
“Rory.”
“Val. My darling. My Val.”
As he bent his black head over hers, he said:
“I was mad, yesterday. Forgive me. There’s nothing and no one but you in the world. Marry me, Val, and let’s make what we can of what’s left to us.”
“I’ll do anything that you want me to do,” she said, and joy rang in her voice.
“Ah, darling—darling!”
“Arlette—Did you find Arlette’s message?” she asked.
“I did, the little poor child! I’ll talk to her on the telephone and see what can be done.”
“Can you go to Ireland?”
“If I go to Ireland,” he answered gravely, “it’ll be with my wife. That’s all that matters to me.”
Madeleine passed through the red-baize door carrying a tray and took it into Lonergan’s office.
“She’s got some coffee for us.”
“Come and drink it, love. You need it. Val, will we get away before anyone else comes down? Will you marry me this morning, as soon as the Registrar’s office opens?”
“You know I will.”
She poured out the hot coffee and handed him a cup.
The dream-like sensation that lay upon Valentine like a spell slowly lost its strength.
“Last night,” she said, “I thought that we couldn’t do it. We couldn’t marry. And the things that you said then are still true, you know.”
“They’re true—but not the whole truth,” he answered. “God forgive me for talking the way I did, darling, but I was fit to be tied, the way that sister-in-law of yours had been going on, and I got into a panic. And all the time, I knew very well I was behaving like a lunatic and that whatever the difficulties, we could surmount them together. Forgive me, Val. Forgive me.”
“Anything
in the world. Always. If there’s anything to forgive, Rory.”
“Ah, you know there is. There will be again, if we’re allowed any sort of life together.”
Their eyes met over the tragic implication of the words, and they were silent.
Presently Lonergan said:
“Love, you’re quite right. The things I spoke of yesterday are still true—they’ll always to a certain extent be true. I can’t live your life, at Coombe. Can you live mine? Not the way it was before the war—that’s over and done with—but perhaps in London, when I’ll be doing my own job again, drawing.”
“I can,” she answered gently and steadily. “Coombe was for the children, and there are no children any more. Even Jess—she’s going away and she won’t ever live here again while the war lasts. And after that we none of us know what this country will be like, do we? All we know is that our daughters won’t be able to live at home, idle, in houses like Coombe, ever again.”
She looked round the room, already made unfamiliar by the office equipment that had been installed for Lonergan.
She thought of the house and the garden, so closely associated with the whole of her married life and with the childhood of Primrose and Jess, so full of the memories of five and twenty years.
Then she looked again at Rory Lonergan.
No conscious recollection came to her of the young Irish boy with whom she had once shared a true and ardent moment of emotion in youth. She saw in him simply her lover: the man who justified to herself her deepest beliefs for ever.
“You’ve made everything come true,” she said, hardly knowing that she was speaking the words aloud.
“And you for me,” he answered.
When they went out together through the double doors the pale light of the winter’s day was dawning.
The slopes of the park were enveloped in snow, all traces of the winding road buried beneath its smooth and dazzling white.
The outline of every bush and tree was altered and rendered new and unfamiliar.
The strange hush that belongs to the fall of snow lay over everything.
For a moment they looked in silence.
Then Lonergan spoke, very softly:
“Ah, it’s wonderful. What a day on which to find one another!”
“It was early summer, the first time,” she said. “Do you remember?”
“I remember, love. My girl of the Pincio Gardens!”
His hand touched gently the silvery wave of her hair.
THE END
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
Copyright © E. M. Delafield 1943
First published in 1943 by Macmillan & Co. Ltd
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ISBN: 9781448203055
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