This was almost awkward, for it was too soon for him to take it as a sign to go. And to dwell upon what Arthur Fontaney had left behind him would not, he strenuously felt, be delicate, since Marianne was clearly so aware of the significance that might attend his visit and so convinced that it was a matter lying wholly within her elder sister’s sphere. He was reduced to speech at random, and the topic of foreign travel suggested itself. The most impecunious English ladies of this sort, he had it in his head, made their little annual trip abroad. “Do you get much to the Continent?” he asked.
She was bewildered, and he had a notion that she was even suppressing an impulse to look around her for support. “My father took me abroad once. It was near the end of his life, and he was very anxious to pay a last visit to places he had known and written about. But, of course, his health was failing by that time. I was just old enough to be useful – the rugs for the train, you know, and seeing that the beds in the hotels were properly aired – and so my father, very kindly, took me with him. We went to Italy. I suppose you know Italy, Mr Quail?”
“Yes.” He spoke very gently, caught by something in her low diffident voice.
“We stayed in Florence. There was a wonderful moment, the night we arrived. I looked out from my window in our small hotel, and there were towers against the sky. They seemed strangely beautiful.” Marianne paused, as if this was something that perplexed her still. “It was all most interesting,” she added. “Everything, of course, was quite different: the people, the language – everything.”
“But you haven’t been abroad since?”
“Oh, no! It would be quite out of the question. There is, you see, so much to do—so much to look after.”
“And Miss Fontaney?”
“Eleanor, of course, has to go abroad from time to time. She is a student of the languages. At present she is reading Tasso. Have you read Tasso, Mr Quail?”
“Well, yes, Miss Marianne – I have.”
“But of course you would have.” Quail fancied that he caught the ghost of a sigh. It was as if for a moment she had fondly cherished some unlikely hope. “I read a great deal myself, but only in English.”
“It’s a tremendous resource.” Being reduced to this inane observation, Quail plunged forward. “Have you any favourite authors?” he asked. He had no sooner spoken than he found himself not very pleased with the question. It was meant only to keep up the talk, but to a detached observer it would have sounded like an illegitimate curiosity, as if Quail had discerned in Marianne Fontaney something quaint that would repay investigation. He might – he rather wildly thought – have been lifting the coverlet from some sleeping virgin in order to make a guilty inventory of her charms.
“I am so fond of Dickens.” Arthur Fontaney’s daughter looked fleetingly at Quail with Arthur Fontaney’s dark- blue eyes. “He is so full of life. The pages stir . . . they vibrate with it. Don’t you think?”
“Yes, I do.” A lapidary age, Quail reflected, if called upon to provide Marianne’s epitaph, would have pronounced her to be of unassuming tastes and correct judgment. But her sister who read Tasso, and her neighbours who were no doubt for the most part enormously clever, probably thought her rather simple. It was very natural that she should enjoy getting away to her Brownies from time to time. But even as he made this reflection, Quail felt the biographer stir within him. “Did your father,” he asked, “ever read Dickens aloud to you as a child?”
“I don’t think he ever did. I can remember Eleanor reading aloud.” Marianne spoke haltingly, as if conscientiously resolved to supply proper information on matters not frequently in her mind. “But that was nearly always in a foreign language. It would have been German, I suppose. Eleanor is said to read German particularly well. And my father, having been a student in Germany at one time, was fond of the literature. Eleanor and he enjoyed it together. I didn’t, of course, understand it at all. But I used to make small woollen mats.”
“I see.” Quail took another glance round the room, and this time its perfections had a new and perplexing effect on him. He realised that it was uneasiness and depression. The place was, as it were, filled to the ceiling with Arthur Fontaney, much as a specimen-bottle is filled with preservative fluid. And it was a medium unsuitable for human beings; living here was really – just as he had earlier glimpsed that he might feel it to be – a sort of living under glass. One could even with some readiness stretch this feeling to fantasy – so drained and faded was the lady, so glowing and pristine the apartment. It was as if the museum – and the place was indeed that – in some purely physical way drew upon the vitality of at least its junior curator. Perhaps there was something to be said for Robin Warboys’ extravagance after all. To gather up everything into a vast pantechnicon and whisk it across the ocean might, towards Marianne, be a vigorously medicinal act. Dogs and Brownies could come tumbling in.
But Eleanor Fontaney was a different matter. Fortified within her indisposition, she lurked enigmatically behind a scene which she could readily be felt to dominate. And yet Quail would not, somehow, very confidently have taken a stiff bet that this was in the last analysis the relationship between the sisters. Marianne was shy, to say the least; indeed, for one of her mature years she was absurdly shamefast, still keeping her eyes much on the carpet, as if fearful that to look up might be to meet some naked glance from the jungle. But latent in her Quail felt a force, or at least a potentiality, not readily definable or calculable. There was assuredly a sense in which she had no secrets, but it was possible that she was without knowledge of a large part of herself.
“Shall you be staying in Oxford long, Mr Quail?”
He realised that she had brought herself, with some resolution, to break a silence longer than he ought himself to have permitted. And it was a question which carried them a little nearer than she was willing to come to his probable business. “I can’t quite say,” he replied cautiously. “I’d like to give Oxford every day I have, this time. Fortunately, Europe makes no other calls on me during my trip.” He paused and she said nothing, so that he felt obliged to go on – and did so rather expansively. “I guess Oxford just isn’t a place it’s easy to have too much of. You must be very fond of it.”
“Oh, yes—oh, indeed, yes.” Marianne’s voice held no conviction; and once more he saw the blood faintly mantling, as if inwardly she was taxing herself with an insincerity. “I have always loved the sea,” she said.
For some reason he found this astonishing. “You would like to live by it?”
“We once went to Hove.” She seemed too diffident for a direct reply. “It was very nice . . . the air . . . the sparkle.” She was again skirting incoherence. “There was . . . a paddling pool.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know it.” Quail couldn’t be certain whether the visit to Hove had belonged to a period at which Marianne herself could reasonably utilise the paddling pool, or whether she was recalling this marine amenity simply as a spectacle. “Most of my own early vacations were spent at a place called Newport. So I love the ocean too.”
“But in Oxford one has the stimulus of so much congenial society.” Marianne, as if feeling that she had been incautious, made this announcement like a child repeating a lesson. “The Ladies’ Musical Society, and the Cercle Français, and always such good sermons.” She paused, and the desperate thought came to Quail that among Marianne Fontaney’s imponderables was an infinitely remote sense of humour. “And Eleanor and I usually both go to the Slade Professor’s lectures. There are lantern slides, which always make lectures so much more interesting.”
“Certainly they do.” Quail would rather have liked to feel that he was being laughed at, but had to dismiss the thought as improbable. He decided on mild experiment. “You must often meet devoted admirers of your father’s work.”
“Yes, of course. But I should give a misleading impression if I implied that we go out a great deal. Eleanor is commonly absorbed in study. But that, as you know”—Marianne spoke with
unusual haste, as if dismayed at the thought of distressing misconception—”that is not why she failed Lady Elizabeth Warboys yesterday. She really had much hoped to go.”
Quail, having murmured of his own disappointment, tried again. “I did myself meet at Lady Elizabeth’s one very distinguished student of your father’s work – Gavin Tandon, a fellow of my own old college.”
“Mr Tandon?” Marianne shook her head, and it was clear that the name conveyed nothing to her. “I’m sure we don’t know him. Although Eleanor is a graduate, we don’t have a great many contacts with the colleges. Of course we always go to the Encaenia garden party. It is very interesting to see such numbers of strange people.”
Quail was again faintly puzzled. It didn’t seem possible to tell whether Marianne was using this last epithet in an ambiguous way, and he found that he really was rather largely curious about the movement of her mind. The time had come, however, for taking his leave, and he stood up. “You will think of me as just one more strange person,” he said. “But I am extremely glad to have met you, and I much look forward to meeting your sister, if she will let me call again when she is well.”
For a moment, as she also stood up, Marianne Fontaney had raised her eyes to his in what might have been either alarm or appeal. Then she glanced uncertainly about her, rather as if some ancestral memory was prompting her to the notion that ceremony now required the ringing of a bell to summon the displaced person with the mop. Almost at once, however, she led the way from the room herself.
In the hall shafts of cold sunlight were falling, uncoloured, through a window filled with stained glass. There is a lot of stained glass in North Oxford, but Quail saw that this glass was different, being some five hundred years old. No doubt the best-conducted Brownie could be felt as constituting something of a menace in the vicinity of that.
Quail moved to the door. He felt that, above all things, he mustn’t too much peer about. As she shook hands, he thought that Marianne was going to part from him in a tongue-tied silence. But at the last moment she did speak. “I hope your visit to Oxford will be pleasant . . . if only we have a fine autumn . . . already . . . so much fog.” Her eyes were fixed on the tiles – genuine mediaeval tiles – at their feet, as she struggled, once more, painfully for words. Then, suddenly and with what might have been immense effort, she was looking at him direct. “Yes—a pleasant and successful visit.”
He walked down the Bradmore Road, wondering.
PART TWO
THE PRINCE
CHAPTER I
So far, it seemed to Willard Quail, events, or at least experiences, had rapidly tumbled in upon him. His quest might not be very positively advanced, but he had learned a good deal about the circumstances in which it would have to be conducted. Now, however, there must be a breathing-space – and it seemed a question whether this might not develop into an irksome marking time.
With his morning call, he saw, he had rather shot his bolt. What more he could do wasn’t clear. The initiative lay with Miss Fontaney, and he would have to wait until she made him a sign. If she didn’t soon do so, then the outlook must be taken as bleak for one or other of them. Either the lady’s health was in a rapid decline and even common social duty beyond her, or such plans as she had in the matter of her father’s remains were to include a brusque turning down of any renewed interest shown by his American biographer.
Thus left for the immediately succeeding days awkwardly in the void, Quail put considerable diligence into pondering whether he might decently send out any signal from it, after all. The practicability of a gift of flowers occurred to his old-fashioned mind, but about such a demonstration there appeared to sound a sickroom, or even a mortuary, note which the extent of his familiarity with the household didn’t entitle him to strike. Some further attention to Marianne Fontaney also appeared, at moments, feasible. If he had known just what modest accession of property, whether recreational or educative, would be grateful to a pack of Brownies, he might well have visited the right shop. But a little thought told him that anything of the sort would not only embarrass the younger sister but also convey an unfortunate impression of his designing to find a soft spot, or even create a fifth column, in the Bradmore Road. He was still uncertain about Marianne’s status there, which, vis à vis Eleanor, might not be what it seemed. An unscrupulous man, he saw, would take all means to investigate this at once. But Miss Fontaney wasn’t a railroad; she wasn’t even a useful Senator or an obstructive Congressman. He remained convinced that his whole campaign must be conducted tremendously according to the rules.
He had, of course, other things to do; people to see; books to hunt up. He had come on a mission, but it wasn’t one with which he would permit himself to be obsessed. And if he did, he found, let his mind at all insistently dwell on the current Fontaney picture, it was to see it with Marianne as the central element in its composition. He had pointed out to Tandon that John Ruskin never made much of mere living people; and it was native to Quail to think poorly of persons of that complexion. People interested him a great deal; and Marianne was the only Fontaney whom he had as yet viewed in the flesh. It was thus natural that she should recur to his thoughts from time to time, although in no more than a hovering way and posing the vaguest of questions – which was what was consonant, indeed, with his memory of her physical presence. Eleanor, on the other hand, seemed to remain outside the reach of his rational speculations or waking consciousness; and when her conjectured image did once or twice rise up before him it was grotesquely and alarmingly in dreams.
In this fashion more than a week went by, until Quail found the day arrived on which he was to dine in his college hall with Robin Warboys. He had a similar invitation for a few evenings later, when he was to be the guest of one of the fellows, now retired, to whom he had been more or less familiarly known, and with whom he had corresponded from time to time. It occurred to him to wonder – though not with much anxiety – whether he ought to be dining with a young man in the body of the hall before the more august hospitality of the seniors on their dais had in fact been extended to him at a time judged proper by themselves. But the point turned out not to arise. For Warboys, with what Quail thought he remembered as typical undergraduate changeableness, had transformed the occasion into a dinner of some solemnity given in his own rooms, and conducted upon principles designed to demonstrate to his distinguished American guest that in the university the manners and customs of the fabulous nineteen-twenties had not perished utterly out of mind. Two men and a boy contrived to serve the meal amid a tremendous clattering of metal dish-covers on enormous trays, and the host worked himself into a fine state of anxiety over the temperature of the wine. The other guests were four youths from four other colleges, and it was clear that they had been hand-picked for the occasion on account of the urbanity of their manners, the reach of their intellectual and artistic interests, and the overpowering maturity of their worldly wisdom.
Quail judged that this made a very pleasant party. He would have preferred, given an absolute choice, a gathering more representative of a cross-section of the place, and the conversation of boys from quite new schools rather than very old ones. But his host was not to be blamed for a display of native English conservatism on such an occasion. It was after ten o’clock when Quail decided to take his leave, and thus, as he supposed, set the younger guests at liberty either themselves to depart or to continue the party in another key. The youths, however, frustrated this intention by suddenly rising in a body, enunciating correct farewells, and marching from the room. It was impossible to tell whether they were acting on instructions from their host or merely in the light of the mild topsyturvydom which rules undergraduate affairs. Quail was left to spend a companionable half-hour with Warboys, who now with modest sufficiency produced a bottle of whisky and a syphon.
There was a cheerful fire, high panelled walls which had been covered with a deplorable chocolate paint, wicker chairs of the most ancient order that creaked when one move
d in them. Quail lay back contentedly, expecting no more than further insignificant talk and the need to finish his whisky, when Warboys said: “I say, sir – there’s a bit of news!”
“News, Robin?” Quail, who had arrived happily enough at this familiar address, felt himself coming a little awake. It struck him that there was only one field in which the young man could have anything to announce to him with this touch of drama.
“The Lion and the Lizard have had the old ladies to lunch.”
“The old ladies?”
“Your two Miss Fontaneys. Today.”
“You seem to run a first-class intelligence service in college.” Quail was not disposed to take Warboys’ announcement as prompting overt surprise.
“I went into the J.C.R. for a spot of tea and met Micky Manningtree. He’d been there.”
“I’m glad Lord Michael didn’t disappoint Mrs Jopling this time.” Quail sipped his whisky. The oddity of what he had just heard didn’t diminish on brief reflection. He had already gathered that the Warden and Mrs Jopling were far from lavish entertainers; and a strong instinct assured him that the substantially retired life of the Misses Fontaney didn’t run to anything like routine lunchings with heads of houses. “Did Manningtree,” he asked, “happen to mention if there had been any other guests?”
“There was just one other person.” Robin Warboys in his turn applied himself to his whisky – and Quail had sufficient detachment to observe that it was something with which his experience was in an experimental stage. “There was just Mr Tandon.”
The Guardians Page 10
