Adrian remained silent. He felt suddenly tired. He had determined, if his mother showed any signs of interfering with him, to make it clear at once that he would not allow it, but he wished, if possible, to do so pleasantly and politely. How curious it was to be sitting opposite this woman—a stranger once more, a woman as different from the one he had seen seven years ago as that one had been from the mother of his early childhood—and listen to her and watch her with so absolute a detachment. She must even now, he noted, be attractive to many men in her vivacious, imperious, old-young fashion. But what would his father think of her if he could see her now? It was impossible to imagine. But now he was embarrassed by her question and the necessity of answering as he was determined to answer it. He blushed and unconsciously stroked the back of his head with his left hand.
“It’s too late for that, Mother,” he said at last. “You see, your … my stepfather and I are complete strangers and even you and I are almost strangers, aren’t we?”
“Adrian!” Minnie’s intonation, by a slight misjudgment, missed the note of pain and sounded that of resentment.
“Well, we are. Honestly, aren’t we? What would be the point of my … er …?”
“Because I wish you to.”
Adrian shook his head, “I’m afraid …” he began, but Minnie interrupted him.
“Remember,” she said, “that I have a right to insist. You’re not yet of age.”
“Listen, Mother,” said Adrian. “Can’t we be reasonable about it? You had a right to insist about the Crowhursts, but it’s next to impossible to make use of such a right. It would be much pleasanter for both of us to meet from time to time like this and talk. Then we would get along splendidly. But if I came to live with you, I should get on your nerves horribly. Yes, I should! I couldn’t possibly help it.”
“What you mean is, I gather, that you won’t come.”
Adrian looked at her, smiling. “Well, you must admit I didn’t put it so rudely.”
She returned his gaze, and by degrees her eyes began to twinkle, and at last she broke into a laugh. “I can’t help liking you, you perfectly horrid boy,” she said; “which is more than I did last time we met. Then I thought you a dreadful little thing. But if I were to tell the General he would be furious, simply furious.” She was serious, very serious now, as if touching on an impressive theme.
But Adrian continued to smile. “And apparently,” she said, her eyes twinkling again, “you wouldn’t care two straws.”
“Won’t you describe the General’s fury, Mother,” he replied. “Then perhaps I might be able to … er …”
“What you want, sir, is a year or two in the Army. And I must say,” she added, inspecting him through her lorgnette, “you would look well in uniform. You would look “—she paused and her eyes suddenly swam with tears—“exactly like your father.”
She took up the menu, studied it for a moment, and then handed it to Adrian. He understood that he must not pursue the subject of his father.
“What will you tell the General about my … disobedience?” he asked.
Saucy questions such as this were exactly what Minnie appreciated. She sparkled immediately. “I shall tell him,” she said, “that, after seeing you, I decided not to resume possession; and that will serve you right.”
The rest of their tête-à-tête passed gaily and they parted on the best of terms. “What fun she is, so long as you give her back tit for tat,” thought Adrian as he got on to a’bus. It would be nice to meet her occasionally and chatter. Now that it was clearly understood that neither had anything but friendly amusement to give the other, they would, he knew, become excellent friends. She was like Ronny in a way, as jolly as could be so long as you gave liberally and demanded nothing in return. She too liked to have admiring people dancing round. What fun to put them both on a desert island and let them dance round each other. There would be some famous collisions during the process.
There was a tinge of early spring in the air, and it was pleasant to sit idle and let the’bus carry him through the roaring traffic, to let the shops and houses slowly pass in a continually varying show, and to feel himself a small, whirling electron of happiness and strength in the middle of that busy flux. His meeting with his mother had, it seemed, added to his already overflowing well-being. For now he liked her. The last traces of his resentment had vanished: he felt for her now an amused affection. He and she understood one another remarkably well: her shortcomings could no longer hurt him and he could see and enjoy her merits. She liked aggressiveness and insubordination, he had discovered, so long as they were gay. He had shown her that he was not to be exploited, and so she would not longer demand filial duty. What she did demand and what he was quite ready to give was filial flirtation. Their escape from one another had drawn them together.
He had escaped from Ronny too, but in the case of Ronny the reaction from that escape was still too new to enable to meet him on the equal terms of independent friendship: he still felt himself impelled to parade his liberty in small acts of aggression which surprised Ronny and ruffled for a moment his good humour, for Ronny was not accustomed to insubordination among his subjects.
The effects on Adrian of these escapes from old, crippling bonds into his new rapture were profoundly beneficial. They roused him from his state of suppression and prolonged immaturity and brought health and vigour to his mind and body. He began at last to live life in its fullness. Seated now on the top of the’bus, he thought with secure and gleeful anticipation of the coming evening, for Lucy and he were dining and going to a concert together.
Lucy too looked forward to the evening with pleasure, for she enjoyed being with Adrian. More and more she valued the frank, lively friendship which was such a welcome change from the wearisome blend of intensity and aggressive frivolity which other young men offered her. She had never yet seriously fallen in love. Occasionally she had felt a pleasant sentimental preoccupation with a young man, sometimes with more than one at once, which she knew herself too well to take seriously. She discussed these passing sentiments light-heartedly with her mother, confessing to each new “flame “with a pantomime of rapture and heart-ache which amused them both. But Adrian was not a “flame.” Mrs. Wendover remarked on it, and Lucy replied that he was too nice. “I’m really fond of him, you see,” she said.
“And not of the flames?” asked her mother.
“Not really,” she said. “They’re just an extra lump of sugar in one’s tea—nice, but not the least bit necessary.”
Months passed. Adrian made new friends. Friends of his grandfather and of Clara and Bob invited him to their houses, and as Ronny’s free evenings were few and unpredictable Adrian did not hesitate to make evening engagements. At last it seemed to Ronny that Adrian’s liberty was exceeding due bounds, and one evening, when he himself had dined alone at Lennox Street and Adrian returned late, he remarked upon the state of things. “Well,” he said, looking up from his novel with less than his usual amiability, “we don’t seem much use to one another nowadays, Little Man, do we?”
“Not much use? What do you mean?” said Adrian.
“Well, as company in the evening, for instance.”
“But you’re so seldom free,” said Adrian. “When I used to dine in, I did so alone more often than not.”
“Still, I am here sometimes, you know.”
“I know, but you never could tell me when. Often when I expected you, you failed at the last minute, didn’t you? I’m not complaining,” he went on. “All I mean to say is that you can’t expect me, and I’m sure you don’t, to stay in night after night on the vague chance.”
That, in point of fact, was what Ronny did expect, but he would not have admitted it even to himself, nor did Adrian appreciate the fact that by his former subservience he had given Ronny grounds to expect it. He was too occupied with Lucy and his new life to perceive these things. Ronny answered him now with a rather unconvincing disclaimer. He had a clear enough sense of fair pla
y to see that he had no right to demand that Adrian should refuse invitations and run the risk of solitary evenings in the precarious hope of his company, but he saw too that Adrian had once been content to do this and now was not. Even the most benevolent of gods does not welcome the loss of a worshipper. The Little Man was ceasing to be the faithful little man that he had once been. He was growing up; in fact, he had already grown up, and all in the last few months.
Occasionally, with a slight tinge of scepticism in his voice, Ronny enquired after Adrian’s mysterious girl. More than once, in the hope of provoking him to divulge something more explicit, he went so far as to express a doubt of her existence. But all to no purpose. Adrian remained uncommunicative; and though Ronny did not persist, this reticence, so far from fending him off, only roused his curiosity, and not only his curiosity, but also a secret resentment. But Lucy remained a myth. Adrian never brought her round to Lennox Street when Ronny was likely to be there, although twice he had taken her there at other times to give her a book or some music which she wanted to borrow.
It was not till September that by accident Lucy and Ronny met. Finding herself near Lennox Street late one afternoon, it occurred to her to call for a book which Adrian had promised to lend her. The maid thought that Adrian was in and showed her up to the sitting-room, where she found Ronny alone.
She had stayed only a few minutes. Ronny had found the book for her, and she had refused, though he had used all his charm to persuade her, to wait till Adrian came in. When she had gone, Ronny lit a pipe, chuckling to himself. It seemed to him a gorgeous joke that he should by this happy accident have unearthed the Little Man’s jealously guarded secret. So this was what had drawn him out of his old self. Well, she was an attractive girl and no mistake. There was something about her … What was it? It was not that she was shy: she was as self-possessed as Nancy or Gill, even as Esmé. But she was somehow much more of a young woman, much more vivid and warmly human than they. They had the hardness and friendly brutality of men. In her he felt the presence of mysteries and hidden tenderness. She was alive, while they, in a way, were dead. What sort of terms were she and Adrian on, he wondered? Adrian had never before shown the least interest in girls. Ronny flattered himself that he was a bit of a Sherlock Holmes, and he remembered now, as a significant fact, that the book she had come for was a book about some musician. Ah, that little fact gave the show away. Ronny laughed to himself with a touch of scorn. That would be just like the Little Man, to pick up a really lovely young creature like this for the simple reason that she was musical, that she was a good person to talk to about music. That explanation pleased him because it put Adrian back in his appropriate immaturity and explained away, without diminishing his own importance, Adrian’s apparent defection. But, in any case, this accidental exposure of the Little Man’s secret was a gorgeous joke, and when, a quarter of an hour later, Adrian came in, Ronny broke out at once.
“Well, the game’s up, Little Man.” He smiled broadly at Adrian. “I’ve just had such a jolly chat with Miss Wendover.”
“She called here?” said Adrian. “Didn’t she leave a message?” But what had happened to the Little Man’s face? Ronny had watched him and had seen his expression change suddenly. For a moment it was as if he had received some terrible news, but almost at once he had controlled himself and both face and voice were being forced to disguise his feelings. What those feelings were Ronny could not make out. Was it just one of the Little Man’s unaccountable fits of shyness? What a funny devil he was. But then, he always had been. He had always been one for sudden, secret feelings, the causes of which remained a mystery. But Ronny’s heavy-handed jocularity dissolved before Adrian’s strange behaviour and, seeing that the subject troubled him, he abandoned it. For an empty, suspended moment there was silence. Then Adrian, in a voice which had almost recovered its normal tone, said: “I’ll just go and have a wash,” and went out of the room.
XXIV
What Adrian feared he could not exactly have said, but for the next two days, until the evening when he was to see Lucy again, he lived in a state of apprehension. A gnawing anxiety pursued him wherever he went. He felt as if Lucy were ill, as if his hold on her had suddenly become insecure, and he longed for the reassurance of the moment of their meeting again. It was in vain that he tried to argue himself out of his fears. What, after all, he asked himself, had happened? Nothing. Lucy had met Ronny and spoken a few words to him: nothing more. Was his fear, then, simple jealousy? Yes, there was jealousy in it, but that was not all. He felt vaguely that something sinister in Ronny, something which he had never defined but had perceived still more strongly in Nancy and Gill and Esmé and Billy, was threatening that warm innocence which was so unspeakably precious to him in Lucy. But he could not analyse his fears, and though his reason told him they were groundless, they persisted, sapping his peace of mind. Time slowed down till it had almost ceased to move, and he could hardly bear to wait for the hour of their meeting.
He arrived early at the restaurant where they were to meet, and as he sat waiting it seemed to him incredible that fate would really allow her to come. He watched the door, sick with doubt, and when, punctual as usual, she came, his relief almost overwhelmed him. How amazed Lucy would have been if she had known all that had happened to him since they last met, the tides of feeling that had swept him, the torrent of relief that, at her coming, had almost cut his feet from under him as he rose to greet her; for nothing was apparent in him except a trace of awkwardness, a little more restraint than was now usual with him, and, throughout the evening, less talkativeness than before.
These signs were so many assurances to her of Adrian’s safety. Once or twice lately she had had misgivings. A sudden flushing of his face when they met, the trace of a tremor in his voice, something unexpected and, as she thought, unlike him in his eyes as he leaned towards her across the restaurant table, had made her wonder for a moment whether his friendship was growing into something more than friendship. But in the end she had always put these things down either to his shyness or his boyish frankness. Perhaps her own wishes had made her unnaturally blind, for what she especially liked and valued in him was that he did not make love to her, did not treat her as a creature to be carefully stalked, but as an intelligent being and an equal. His behaviour tonight strengthened her confidence. She could not have divined that he was silent because his heart was too full to talk, because he was content, in the blissful release from his anxiety, to sit in her presence and drink in the rapture it brought him.
He desired now only one final reassurance, that she should tell him of her meeting with Ronny. But the evening wore on, they left the restaurant and made their way to the Wigmore Hall, the concert began, the interval came, and still she said nothing of her call at Lennox Street. Her silence roused once more his lulled anxieties. He felt them grow up in him like a crop of weeds, spreading, flowering, scattering a shower of small poisonous fruit. At last, as the interval drew to a close, he turned to her and, fixing his eyes on her face, said:“I’m glad you got the book all right.”
Perhaps it was the intentness of his gaze that made her colour rise, but he was sure that there was a constraint in her voice when she replied.
“Yes,” she said, “I called, as I expect you heard.” She hesitated, and then added: “I thought I should find you in.”
That was all. And yet, he argued miserably with himself in bed that night, wouldn’t it have been the natural thing for her to have mentioned Ronny, even to have done so when they first met without his having to raise the subject of the book later and give her the chance? Wasn’t her reticence an ominous symptom? What was she keeping back from him? What had they said when they met? What did she think of Ronny? She had thought too much, of course, to trust herself to speak of him. A black wave of despair rose, yawned, and burst over him. “Lucy!” his heart cried out to her desperately in the darkness.
Then his mind set to work again. And what of Ronny? The thought of Ronny brought
him some comfort, for Ronny had had no reticences; he had cheerfully blurted the whole thing out at once. That surely showed that he, at least, had nothing to hide. Besides, Ronny was a thorough sportsman: he would never go to work behind his back to entice Lucy away from him. No; but Ronny enticed whether he meant to or not. However right his intentions might be, his charm might capture Lucy, might have captured her already. At the thought of losing her, her image, heart-rendingly clear, heart-rendingly precious to him, swam up into his consciousness. It was too terrible to be true that he was going to lose her. And then, in reaction against the monstrosity of the thought, he assured himself once again that nothing had really happened at all, that the whole thing was a figment of his imagination. Once one allowed one’s imagination to start working there was nothing it wouldn’t invent. And it was always worse at night: he knew that. When he awoke to-morrow morning he would find that the whole thing was a feverish nightmare. His mind, torturing him with alternate terrors and reassurances, at last exhausted its ingenuity, and as a distant clock struck three he fell asleep.
XXV
The long drawing-room was cleared for dancing. Against the background of green-panelled walls the coloured shapes of dancing couples glided and revolved to the hot pulse of the music. Others sat and talked on chairs and sofas pushed back against the wainscot. The music stopped, the rhythmic movements of the dancers broke off into slow confusion and Ronny’s hostess took possession of him. “Come with me, Mr. Dakyn,” she said. “I want to introduce you to a very charming young friend of mine.”
Adrian Glynde Page 23
