The Weather in the Streets (The Olivia Curtis Novels)

by Rosamond Lehmann

  Luckily she agreed about that, he’s not her type, she likes small un-English-looking dapper men.

  “But, my dear, some women rave about him, I believe. Iris Mountford was tremendously smitten once—and that Hungarian wife of Ronnie Arkwright’s. Ronnie had to take her round the world.”

  “When was that?” I said.

  “Oh, before he married—years ago. I believe he’s most circumspect and domestic now, isn’t he?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “At least, as far as I know.”

  “You take care,” she said, shaking her head archly. “Those virtuous husbands can be awful traps—-for more insidious than the obvious flirts.”

  “Oh, my dear!” … I shrugged my shoulders, entering into the spirit …” Not a hope.” An utterly dreary feeling came on, thinking of the Hungarian wife, of his reputation as a virtuous husband, of Etty’s typical light assumption that all married men were up to no good on the sly.

  After a week I was much better, but the doctor made me go on staying in bed. I was thankful—I dare say my subconscious was seeing to it—it was easier to hide in bed; it meant I needn’t face the business of living over the time of good-bye. He came to say good-bye one evening about six. I’d been having visitors the last two days, so it didn’t seem too odd. Etty went out, arch and tactful. He brought a bottle of champagne, which saved the situation, suppressing the ghastly cobwebs and sawdust feeling in my inside, not to speak of the tears I’d felt sure I’d shed. I got quite cheerful and made him laugh, he was so relieved and pleased with me. I expect he’d dreaded a scene. He said I looked prettier than ever—much too tempting. I took his big blue and green silk handkerchief out of his pocket, to have something of him to take to bed every night. I did, too. He debated what to take of mine that would be intimate yet not compromising. My toothbrush, I suggested. Finally he took the ribbon off my nightdress and put it in a compartment of his manly note-case.

  “One plain white satin ribbon, an inch wide, without laundry mark or initials,” he said. “Non-identifiable in case of loss, accident or theft … It’s safe there. I shall take a peep at it every night and morning … and possibly sometimes at midday as well.”

  We kissed, he held me close; it isn’t for long, we said, write often, cable … “A family dinner party to-night,” he said. “I shan’t be able to ring up. Besides, you must go to sleep early.” There didn’t seem one particular instant of his going, but he’d gone … And then he was gone. It was rather bad then … Late that evening half a dozen bottles of champagne arrived of course. I must say they helped my convalescence … In the morning, before Etty was awake, I crept down to the sitting-room and rang up his house: the first time of breaking the rule. “Hallo!” I thought for a moment it was him—the butler must imitate his voice. “Could I speak to Mr. Spencer, please?” Everything was swimming. I shook all over.

  “Mr. Spencer left for the United States, madam, twenty minutes ago. Mrs. Spencer has accompanied him to Southampton and will be back to-night; would you care to leave any message, please?”

  Very nicely said; efficient, concise, polite. “I see …” Emphatically casual. “No, no message, thank you. It doesn’t matter a bit. Thank you very much.”

  When I was better Anna told me she’d decided to give up the studio, anyway for the summer, and try to do some painting again instead. She wasn’t paying her way, she was sick of it. She’d felt lately she must take to the brush again. She had ideas about changing her technique and getting on better. Simon was going to be in France all summer, he’d offered her his cottage for two guineas a week. Why didn’t I come too? She wouldn’t let me share the rent, but I could share other expenses. She was worried, I knew, having to cut off my pound a week, but also she wanted my company. So I said Yes. With Rollo not there London was awful, anyway. Time enough when he came back to see how he felt about my being out of London, but easily reached by car. I thought myself I might see him for longer times with more peace and leisure … country summer evenings, I pictured, perhaps nights together in country pubs. Mother highly approved my leaving my unhealthy London life … A year ago she’d have tried to make me come home and be looked after, but now with Dad and nurse to supervise, she seems to dismiss me more easily. She has enough. Violet and Ada have enough trays and hot drinks to see to. The last times I’d been home she’d only wanted me to gossip and amuse her. She’d seemed almost detached about James and his walking tours in France and his suddenly announced decision to take a room in Paris. As if she’d decided to say at last, “Oh, what the hell! Let them rip …” She’s tired. Home is narrowed down to an unalterable invalid routine.

  May, June went by in the country … There’s no two ways about it, the early days are clearer—those first few weeks in the winter … Now after May, right up till now, till August, there seems a slowing down of my vitality, impulse—a faint mist over every scene. Don’t I feel so much? It’s natural, I suppose. One can’t keep up the pitch I started at, it wears one out. There comes a sharp break of separation. You feel at first it’s not to be borne, but you bear it, you grow accustomed … Longing sinks down and is silted over … You never uncover it again in its first unearthly freshness … That’s what happened. Week after week of being irrevocably far away. Sitting up in bed in the nights, sending out the very utmost desperately-stretched feelers of thought quivering to find him wherever he was—I couldn’t find him; though sometimes I kidded myself I did for a moment or two … Perhaps one needs a mutual effort for successful telepathy; I’m sure he never tried. Of course there were letters. But as usual his letters were sketchy, they didn’t make a lot of difference, though if they hadn’t come, I suppose I’d have gone mad … On the whole it was easier than I expected; being with Anna was what really helped, and in the country, and in Simon’s house.

  Simon’s house is one to love, it’s important, like a being with its own life and idiosyncrasies. It filled up a little of the emptiness, it got to be in some way a substitute for a part of Rollo: a channel for emotion … Simon’s house is poetic. Not pretty, sweet, quaint, old-world, anything like that. … When I think of it, I think of it as standing back a little from reality, like a small Victorian engraving of a house—a tailpiece in a book; or like something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Yet one can pass dozens more or less like it on a motor drive; small white houses, prim, rather narrow, straight-fronted, green-shuttered, two pairs of windows, the lower pair longer, larger than the upper, a steep-sloping, slate-tiled roof, with two miniature dormer windows in it. I wonder who built it and when … It’s by no means an architectural gem—yet it’s entirely special;’ I suppose it’s the setting and the feeling of isolation … And because it’s Simon’s. When Billy came down he said haunted, but he would … The layout of garden is what’s so queer. No flowers or flower-beds; all grass—trees—water. In front, the narrow length of rough lawn, edged all round with a ragged stout hawthorn hedge … Two rosemary bushes under the lower windows. Half-way down the lawn, a bit to one side, the pear-tree, tall and old, flings up with an astonishing sideways curve and lift—a dancer’s pause. … Three elms at the end of the grass. The front door’s in the right side; no gate, a gap in the hedge, a bit of grass and you come to it, painted green. Opposite it, the other side of the rutty cart-road leading to it, is a perfectly round black pond ringed with fine chestnut trees; and beyond, half-hidden by them, a barn, some cow-sheds, old brick and lichenous tile, tumbling down, disused this many a year. If you stare into the pond, the black mud basin goes down sheer—bottomless they say. The surface never stirs, but just beneath it goes on a myriad stirring of infinitesimal wriggling black pond life … The cart road winds off at an angle through the field to join the hedgy lane to the village; and the way to the river is over a stile by the elms at the bottom of the lawn, over a flat green meadow, another stile, another meadow, willow hedges—then the river, with shallow broken earthy banks just there, rushes, flags, meadow-sweet, wi
llow-herb; a sort of little beach in one place, where we picked up mussels when we bathed.

  Anna does love that house. She says one could paint all one’s life within a two-mile radius from the door. Morning, afternoon, evening, she scuttled out with her easel—whenever she wasn’t cooking, in fact. She likes cooking, she did more of it than me, I’m afraid. She had depressed times about her painting, and scrapped two-thirds, but she thought she was getting on better on the whole. All the rooms smelt of turpentine and wet canvases. She was preoccupied at meals and forgot to comb her hair, and had streaks of paint on her face. Dear Anna, I do like her so much. She’s so quiet … She’s independent, her judgment is right, just on the sour side. Though she’s not at all serene or confident underneath—quite the reverse—she makes no demands. When she’s very low she just gets quietly drunk. She lives an intensely concentrated inner life of thought and feeling, but never highbrow, priggish or pedantic; and when she’s enjoying something—a picnic, a drive, a party—she’s almost ludicrously irresponsible, as unselfconsciously extrovert and simple as a child. A grotesque element comes up in her—something there is in her of the clown of the world … The most unvulgar woman I’ve ever known … Colourless … Unperspicacious people think dull, insipid; they’re wrong. If you break up white, there are all the colours … I wonder if she’ll ever marry again or get properly fixed up … Poor Anna, she doesn’t have much luck, she will choose the most unlikely people … I suppose the truth is, she doesn’t in her inmost heart want anybody to supplant Simon … He’s absorbed her emotion … although I suppose whatever the relationship once was—nobody seems to know exactly, she never tells any one much—it’s all quieted down now, worked itself on to some sort of possible permanent friends basis. It can never have been very satisfactory for her. It must always be partly painful to love Simon … I’m proud that Anna’s fond of me. It’s not only her being so much older makes me rely on her … Integrity has become a debased word, sentimental, like purity, or I’d say Anna has integrity.

  May, June … May was wet and cold, June sunny from end to end, my legs and arms got brown, Anna’s dusty hair bleached in stripes, her eyes looked brilliant blue in her dusty-brown face. In May the hawthorn hedge was soaking; after a windy night the elm flowers came down in drifted heaps at the end of the garden. How pretty they are; I’d never noticed: clusters of green discs with a clear, red stain in each. Being with Anna is what makes me remember such country details so precisely. Her visual sense is so sharp and penetrating, she helped me to see too; not just look and dream, half-remember, half-overlook and forget. Country walks with her make an experience in themselves, not an excuse for day-dreaming­; or for banging along blindly, like Jocelyn, fiercely considering literature and the proletariat. She sees into hedges, seeing leaves and moths and beetles; she sees how a tree grows in a landscape.

  In May there was a frost; it made the evening strange. The full-sailing, torch-loaded chestnuts were caught, islanded in the pale blue-green Arctic fields of sky. All over the earth was the flowering spring growth; in the sky was frail winter light … A dream of winter, sweet as spring … The living green, the fruit-blossom enclosed in a cold transparent lucent shell of light—brittle, perilous … The cuckoo was strange, an icy note. I wanted Rollo terribly that evening. We were threatened.

  After that frost, the weather softened out, the warm days came. The doors and windows stood wide open from morning to night, people came every week-end to stay; in the evenings we went down through the buttercups and willows to bathe in the river, and afterwards played darts and had drinks at the Dog and Duck. Or if somebody had a car, we motored in to Oxford … It sounds an ideal life … it should have been … I don’t remember much apart from the sun, and waiting for the post; and swimming in the river … I was writing a bit, but it didn’t get on much; I planned three stories, each with a different background of water—a river, a lake, a sea. It sounds a good idea, but it won’t get done. I took some jolly fine notes though; all my writing energies went into doing that—and into my letters to Rollo. Every three days I posted off a fat envelope, a diary really. He loved them; so he ought. Every single one of his letters was disappointing and precious … He seemed to be having such a good time; he said how he missed me, but I don’t see that he had a moment to miss me. Parties, week-ends, gorgeous American girls … Loads of peaches, he wrote, nobody who’s taken my fancy, darling. I didn’t always believe it. I saw him open to onslaught on every side—flirting as he always must, saying the things he said to me, starting an affair for the duration … There’d be plenty willing, and he loves sleeping with people—and what was to stop him? Me? Nicola? Unfaithful to her with me, why not to me with someone else? Ce n’est que le premier pas qui côute—and he’d taken that with me. Why shouldn’t he embark on a career as lover, one affair within another, each secret, in a water-tight compartment? … Perhaps he had already … Of course he had. I had bad moments … Jealousy coming like a bank of poison gas out of a clear sky, corrupting the face of the earth. After one letter about a week-end on Long Island I lay on my bed and tore his blue handkerchief, and hit my head again and again on the bed-rail. I did … I can’t believe it, but I did … It was after that I couldn’t stand it any more, I told Anna that evening that he was my lover. That made it more real, a load rolled off, I was happier. We talked about him till very late, she said everything just right and cheered me up. For one thing, she took it all for granted, accepted it with her cool sympathy as a live, working relationship. And she seemed to understand why it was, how it was; she illumined the situation all over again for me, asking questions that showed me him and myself. Trying to describe with absolute sobriety and precision what he was like, what had happened, made me detach him from the amorphous emotional fog and observe him more objectively, as I did for a brief moment before this started. She understood I was jealous … I asked her had she guessed what was going on and she said quietly, Yes, but didn’t like to ask questions. She is nice. I’m glad I told her. I can trust her to be silent, and she won’t criticise or give advice …

  He sailed for England early in July. But he didn’t land in England; Nicola met him at Southampton and they went to Cherbourg and landed, and spent a week in Paris. A reunion, a holiday away from everybody; her idea, he said; he personally would rather have come straight back. I wonder what … I wonder why … He didn’t refer to Paris much to me, except to say it had been looking nice, they’d had quite an amusing time, but it was her idea; she hadn’t been in such good form for years, full of impulsive plans like that. I said Good, I was glad, she must be feeling better. I wondered to myself if she had a lover …

  It was the middle of the month when he got back and rang up. I wanted to dash straight up to London, but he said better not, he was so busy; he’d slip off the first moment he could and get down for the day, anyway. He’d come home to a perfect whirl … He sounded busy and distrait. Two days later came the telegram—meet him in Oxford, the Mitre, one o’clock. It was a Friday, hot and sunny. I went in by the morning bus, in my clean coral-pink linen dress, and the peasant straw hat from the south of France, with a wreath of poppies and daisies round it. I walked down Long Wall and the Broad, trying to observe the architecture, looking into shops, but I was too flustered. I shivered, my hands were icy-cold, sweating. At one I walked into the Mitre. He was a quarter of an hour late, he looked hot and Londony … We had a couple of iced gin fizzes, then it was better, we could look properly at each other and smile. He said. “Oh, darling, you look about seventeen in that hat!” He kept saying: “I am so pleased to see you, darling …” But he was—what was he?—a bit preoccupied … not evasive exactly, but skimming about on the surface, a shade imprecise, facile, hard to pin down. He didn’t seem to be able to describe much of what he’d been doing all these weeks … but he never can give a clear account of his activities. He forgets, he says … He told me it had been awfully difficult to get away—he’d had to tell the most complicated set of
lies to get out of a family fixture that evening; there’d been considerable sickness; he’d had to invent something about seeing George off to the Continent, and he didn’t see how he could stay the night; she’d accepted for a week-end party for him, they were due to drive down in the morning … Yes, it wasn’t just the natural awkwardness of re-meeting in a public place, he was different in some deeper way … Perhaps I was too … Perhaps it was simply the break and neither of us was the same—or ever has been since … Naturally, relationships can’t stand still, they must develop …

  We drove back to the house after lunch, I showed him everything. We had it to ourselves; Anna had gone out with Colin and the others on the river, we were to join them after tea for a bathe. The house delighted him, specially inside—the light bright mixtures of colour, the decorations on the walls and doors, the whole flavour of the house that is so strong and individual I can almost taste it in my mouth; every object, every bit of stuff chosen with an unfailing idiosyncratic eye—even to the water-jug, the salt-cellar—yet all quite valueless in terms of money; mostly faded, chipped, worn … And the rooms in themselves aren’t a good shape or size. He said he hadn’t realised what one could do with a cottage. I don’t think it was just the desire to be agreeably enthusiastic; Rollo’s very quick and sensitive to places, he takes in a lot. He said, which is true, that though it’s stimulating, there’s something not quite cheerful … He wished Marigold could see it. But she wouldn’t like it, really—none of those people would; any more than Kate would. As for Mother, she’d deplore it. The fittings are distinctly casual; queer mattresses, and a stormy, capricious plug, and a rough little bright-green bath in a blistered bathroom so small you soon can’t see for steam. Personally, I like it—cosy and secretive—hardly able to see one’s own legs. Back to the womb with a vengeance. Anna says if I could sublimate my bath-lust I might become adult. She’s sublimated hers all right, if she ever had one. I had that bathroom practically to myself.