He felt friendly and at ease with her. It was as if their acquaintanceship had ripened in absence.
“And how’s the Royal College?” she enquired.
“It’s very well indeed, thank you.”
“You’re enjoying it?”
“Immensely.”
Their conversation was soon interrupted by the applause that greeted Beecham’s return. The next piece was Handel’s Water Music, and the music itself and the tender, lyrical beauty of Beecham’s rendering of it entranced Adrian. It seemed to him the most lovely music in the world. When the interval came they went out together. As he followed her up the stepped gangway he noticed the simple faultlessness of her white cloak with its ermine collar. She leaned against the wall of the corridor and he stood facing her, smoking a cigarette. Her small, square face, her black hair and black eyes, looked even more charming without a hat.
“I’m very glad we met,” he said.
“So am I,” she answered frankly, “and I’m glad, too, that you’re glad, because you weren’t a bit pleased, you know, last time I ventured to speak to you.” Her black eyes danced.
“In the train, you mean?” said Adrian.
“Yes. You scowled fearfully and looked extremely bored.”
“I thought you were laughing at me.”
“And so I was.”
“Why? Is there any harm in reading music in the train?”
“You were so terribly serious, and your scowls amused me. I’m not used to being scowled at.”
Adrian laughed. “Well, you know, I … I … thought you …”
“Thought me what? “Her smiled enboldened him.
“Well, rather an impertinent young person.”
She broke into a laugh. “And so I suppose I was, by the most correct standards.”
“But I’m doing my best to forgive you now,” said Adrian.
What a nice child he was, she thought to herself, as he stood before her with his unconscious, boyish grace. She was amused and attracted by the quiet earnestness with which he spoke, even when his words were frivolous. And how frank and friendly he was: he treated her, she thought, just as he would treat a boy or a man. That she was an attractive young woman did not seem to occur to him, and she found that refreshing and, somehow, flattering. He was looking at his programme now, and next moment he glanced up from it impulsively. “I say,” he said, “I hadn’t heard about this.”
He handed her the programme, pointing to a concert advertised for the following week. “Are you going to it?” he asked when she had run through the programme.
“Most certainly I am,” she replied, “if there are any tickets left.”
“Then you haven’t got a ticket?”
“No.”
“Shall I get you one when I get mine?”
“Please do,” she said. “That will be very kind of you. Then you’ll let me know if you manage to get them?”
“Yes,” said Adrian as if the matter were settled.
She paused, smiling, and then said: “You won’t by any chance want my address or telephone number, or perhaps even my name?”
“Your name?” He was astonished to discover that he didn’t know her name, “and of course you don’t know mine either,” he said. “How extraordinary!”
She laughed. “Is it so extraordinary?”
“It seems so to me,” said Adrian simply.
He returned on foot to Lennox Street. To sit still in a bus or tube would have been unendurable. Only by strenuous bodily movement could he ease the intense happiness that glowed in him, suffused his body and limbs, flooded his heart with warm light. He strode forward, but his thoughts and feelings streamed back ecstatically to the evening behind him. Her face, her laughing black eyes, her exquisite white, silky dress and cloak kept swimming up into his memory. Lucy Wendover. An enchanting name. He laughed happily to himself. What a state of excitement he was in. Was he in love with her, then? Evidently that was what was up with him. How astonishing. How amusing. How profoundly enthralling. He fumbled mechanically for his latchkey and opened the door. As he rounded the turn in the stairs he saw, from a long crack of light under the door, that the sitting-room was occupied. Were some of those wretched people there? Well, he didn’t mind if they were, damn them. He opened the door and went in.
Ronny was alone, sprawling on the sofa with a pipe and a book. He raised his eyes to Adrian and gave a long yawn; and Adrian stood for a moment looking at him as if from a great distance. He had completely forgotten Ronny during the last three hours, and now, as he stood there, it was as if he were rediscovering him. At the same time he was discovering himself, his new self which told him that he was independent of Ronny. Independent and even slightly hostile, stirred by an impulse to exhibit his freedom by slighting him. For a moment he felt like obeying the impulse. “Hallo,” he might say, “you’re in. Well, I’m sleepy and I’m off to bed. Good night.” That would be to repeat the act of his first meeting with Ronny in that room, but with the parts reversed.
But Ronny was already speaking. “Hallo, Little Man, so you’re back. Lord, but you do look well.”
“So I am,” he answered, laughing to himself in the knowledge of his rapturous secret. He threw his coat and hat on a chair, walked to the mantelpiece, and, lighting a cigarette, stood with his back to the fire looking down on Ronny, who still sprawled on the sofa.
Ronny inspected him, as they talked, with puzzled curiosity. What had come over him? He had never seen him so forthcoming, so surprisingly full of beans. Adrian went to the sideboard and got an apple. He devoured it, then got another and devoured that.
“Didn’t you have any dinner?” Ronny enquired.
Adrian seemed surprised at the question. “Dinner? Yes, an excellent dinner, thanks.”
They talked for a few minutes more, and then Adrian declared he must go to bed. Hitherto he had always been glad to sit up for as long as Ronny was willing to do so. This unaccustomed Adrian was really rather extraordinary, rather unorthodox, but it was not Ronny’s habit to ponder and draw conclusions. He went to bed and forgot the incident, and as Adrian appeared much as usual at breakfast next morning, he had no reason to recall it.
Next day Adrian succeeded in getting the tickets for the concert, and at once rang up Lucy Wendover to tell her so. As he waited for her with the receiver in his hand he was inspired by the bold idea of asking her to dine before the concert; but when her voice came, so clear and precise and disappointingly matter-of-fact, his courage was damped, and he acquiesced when she said that they would meet in their places. Hadn’t she sounded rather cold, he wondered as he left the telephone-box. What had he said to put her off? He did not realise that he had imagined a coldness in her voice merely because its effect had not been reinforced by her lively presence and those mischievous, dancing eyes of hers; nor could he take into account the fact that she knew nothing of his feelings for her.
But when they met at the concert a few days later he found no trace of coldness in her. That evening was for him even more entrancing than the first, and when they parted she invited him to dine with her and her mother two days later. The invitation greatly reassured him. He saw in it, poor infatuated boy, much more than there was any warrant for seeing. It did not occur to him that Lucy’s mother might have insisted on inspecting and approving the stray young man with whom her daughter had made friends, or that they might both wish merely to establish an acquaintance with him, might have been tempted to do so by his relationship to the famous Oliver Glynde. Whether these things were so or not, Adrian left them out of account. Lucy had invited him, he believed, because she felt for him not, he humbly told himself, what he felt for her—how could she? but something at least, he vaguely hoped, more than mere friendliness; and therefore she had wanted to introduce him to her mother, to draw him into the family circle. These omens added to his already overflowing happiness.
He was received by a slightly subdued, slightly less mischievous Lucy, who introduced him to a small
, frail grey-haired woman with the delicate, fragile face and hands of an invalid and, unexpectedly, a quiet assurance of speech. She received Adrian with a charming friendliness which won his heart at the outset. Her quietness, her dignity, and her kindness seemed to him to make Lucy more real and more secure for him. He played to them after dinner and went home dangerously encouraged, his heart warmed by Mrs. Wendover’s pressing him to come again.
“Well, Mother,” said Lucy when he had gone; “has he passed?”
Mrs. Wendover smiled. “Oh, certainly he has,” she said. “He’s a dear boy. But don’t let him fall in love with you. He’s far too young.”
“Oh, far too young,” Lucy agreed. “But, thank goodness, he’s too wrapped up in his music to fall in love. That’s what makes him so awfully nice. He talks to me as if I were one of his boy friends. And he’s extraordinarily interesting about music: to go to a concert with him is a revelation. I feel as if I were discovering music for the first time.”
“He certainly plays exquisitely,” said Mrs. Wendover; “such breadth, and his tone is quite superb.”
Week followed week, and they met often, dining or lunching and going to concerts together—delightful occasions only a little dimmed for Adrian by Lucy’s unshakable insistence that she should pay her share for tickets and meals, and by her way of sometimes, as if suddenly detaching herself from him, treating him with a kind of maternal patronage. For Lucy, those moments, at which she felt herself so much older than him, were moments of expansive affection, but they mortified Adrian. He, on the contrary, felt that she was thrusting him from her. For him they reflected Ronny’s attitude, implied in his nickname of Little Man, a nickname which had once warmed his heart, but which nowadays often shamed and irritated him. But they were small matters—those little checks on his happiness in Lucy. Adrian at this time was in that state of supreme well-being in which life breaks into a new and marvellous blossoming. He awoke each morning radiantly happy, he went about his work and pleasures with that abundant zest which devours all that is set before it and cries out for more and he went to bed aglow with health and happiness.
To Ronny he told almost nothing. Ronny had soon noticed his increased absences from Lennox Street, and had concluded that he was avoiding the society of Esmé and the rest. One evening when Adrian returned home late he had taunted him on the subject. “Hallo, Little Man,” he had said as Adrian entered the sitting-room; “running away from the girls again?”
Adrian was puzzled, and, when Ronny had explained, was stung into replying: “As it happens, I was spending the evening with one.”
Ronny laughed. “You, Little Man? Don’t tell me.”
Adrian was annoyed by Ronny’s persistent assumption. “My dear Ronny,” he said, with a touch of haughtiness, “you can’t expect, even with your well-known charm, to monopolise the whole female population.”
Ronny in turn was somewhat nettled. “Well, I must say, you are coming on,” he remarked patronisingly, and then added with a return to his usual good-humour: “Anyhow, I hope it was a pleasant evening.”
“Very pleasant, thanks,” said Adrian, amiable but totally uncommunicative. He felt very definitely that he did not want Ronny to know about Lucy. In his new independence he had, at times, a curious feeling of resentment towards Ronny, and he was not going to share his wonderful secret with him. Not likely.
One evening about this time he had dined alone in Lennox Street and was reading in his usual armchair when there was a tap at the door and Esmé came in. He had not noticed the front-door bell.
She stopped short when she saw that he was alone. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “Isn’t Ronny in?”
She waited, ready to go if Adrian said that he was not; but Adrian, getting up from his chair, found himself replying: “He’s out at present, but he said he’d be in early. Won’t you wait?”
She hesitated. “Well … thank you.… Yes, I will,” she said. “But don’t let me interrupt your reading.”
“I was only reading because I was alone,” said Adrian and to his surprise he found that he no longer mistrusted and disliked her.
“You’ve known Ronny for some time, haven’t you?” she asked after they had talked of other things.
“Yes, I was at school with him.”
She sat silent for a moment, contemplating with a half wistful, half scornful smile some image of her mind. “What was he like as a boy?” she said.
“Exactly like what he is now,” said Adrian, “except for the moustache. If he shaved that off there’d be almost no difference.”
“Ah, but in himself, I mean,” she said; “in character.”
“Exactly the same in character too,” said Adrian. It seemed to him that he saw Ronny quite clearly, knew him inside out.
“Except that now he’s grown up,” she said.
“No,” said Adrian, “not even that. He’s just what he always was.”
She paused, her face melancholy with thought. “The trouble with Ronny is,” she said, as if suddenly resentful, “that you can’t pin him down, you can’t catch hold of him. If you try to, he slips through your fingers.”
“He doesn’t want you to catch hold of him,” said Adrian. “Ronny likes, and in fact expects you to fish for him, but if you try to catch him he’s … well, he’s bored and, as you say, slips through your fingers.”
Esmé smiled bitterly. “You know our Ronny very well,” she said.
He could see that she was depressed, thwarted, disillusioned, and his heart ached for her. So Ronny produced that effect, it seemed, on girls too who ventured too near him. That he should have been bored by the sentimental importunities of boys like himself and Ellenger was only natural. It was their own faults, not his. But there was also, it seemed now from the case of Esmé, some vital quality lacking in him. “I know him well enough to know that.…” He hesitated, broke off, and then said: “He’s a delightful chap, but I wouldn’t bother about him too seriously, if I were you.”
Esmé sighed. “Easier said than done, worse luck!” she said.
She waited till a quarter to eleven. Then, there being still no sign of Ronny, she went disconsolately away.
XXXIII
Minnie Clandon had so many social engagements after her return to England that it was not until over a month after obtaining Adrian’s address from Clara that she found time to write to him. When she did so she told him that she would be in London on the following Wednesday, that she was simply longing, after all these years, to see him again, and that she wanted to have a very particular talk with him. She asked him to meet her for lunch.
Adrian turned up at the appointed hour in the restaurant she had named, but when she arrived, twenty minutes late, he would have failed to recognise her if she had not picked him out; for her hair, under the influence no doubt of Indian suns, had changed to a subdued auburn and she was much altered. Though she had now reached an age that was neither young nor old, she had the appearance of an old woman who looked wonderfully young. He had come to the meeting with few other feelings than idle curiosity and a determination not to be imposed upon, yet the change in her shocked him so much that, as he followed her to the table she had reserved, he would have given much to be able to slip away and abandon her.
“Well, my dear boy,” she said, eyeing him with bird-like admiration as she sat down, “how you have blossomed out. I wasn’t prepared for you to be quite so … what shall I say? … impressive.”
Adrian smiled a little awkwardly. “I’m sorry,” he said, with an attempt at jocularity, “if I’ve provided a shock.”
“Shocks are not always unpleasant,” said Minnie archly, “though I must say you make me feel a hundred. However, one must be prepared for that after … what is it? Five? Six? Seven years?”
“Isn’t it seven?” said Adrian, imitating her vagueness.
She was taking off her gloves with little fluttering movements, and, having dropped them lightly on the table, she began to burrow in a little bead bag
, and at last fished out a slim gold lorgnette. “My sight is getting quite hopeless,” she said pleasantly, screwing up her eyes, applying the lorgnette, and glancing critically at the other tables.
“What a funny, silly little thing she is,” thought Adrian, half amused and half disgusted. Then, feeling suddenly aggressive, he asked point blank: “Did you enjoy that visit to the Crowhursts?”
Minnie came out of her lorgnette, and frowned as if trying to recall the occasion. She was taken aback by Adrian’s extraordinary question. The Crowhurst episode she considered, was not a theme for levity, and it was difficult on the spur of the moment to decide how to take Adrian’s glib reference to it. She decided to take it with dignity.
“I was disappointed last time we met, Adrian,” she said.
“We were both disappointed, Mother,” Adrian replied, “but fortunately disappointments don’t last for ever, do they?”
Minnie frowned again. Though Adrian had improved in appearance, he had not, it seemed, improved in the matter of discipline. To put an end to the subject she summoned the waiter and asked for red pepper.
“Your Aunt Clara tells me,” she said, “that you’re taking up music. Isn’t that rather a pity?”
“A pity?” echoed Adrian.
“Yes, as a profession. It’s all very well, of course, as a hobby in one’s spare time. But as a profession! We must really get you into something a little more … what shall we say? … solid! Gentlemanly! My … er … your … er … The General has of course a good deal of influence. We must all three discuss it.”
“But what is there to discuss, Mother?” said Adrian. “It’s too late now to discuss. I’ve chosen music, as you’ve heard, and I’ve already been working at it for over two months.”
“Still, you will admit, won’t you, that there are two sides to the question?”
“Two sides? Certainly, in the sense that some people like it and others don’t. But, as it happens, I do.”
“What I mean is, my dear boy,” said Minnie, placing her hand emphatically on his for a moment as if patiently to check his impertinence, “that I, as your mother, must be allowed some say in the matter. Remember, you are not yet of age. And there’s another thing I want to talk over with you. Your … your stepfather and I, now that we are settling in England, are anxious for you to join us.”
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