“I think, Warden, I’m pretty well as I am. Of course I want to see the journals – or at least the greater part of them – published; I’d like to see the work done by scholars I know; I’d like to lend a hand in several places where I’m tolerably fit to do so. What’s more, I’d like to see the manuscripts, which I reckon to be as precious as any from that age, go to the university where my own first loyalty lies. But I’m not crazy about it all; I don’t propose to be gotten crazy; and if I can see Gavin Tandon shielded from anything of the same sort I’ll do so. As to Miss Fontaney, she’d better decide things for herself. I know she’s poor, and she knows I know it. She knows what I’d like, and what I have behind me. That, to my mind, is good enough; and I don’t propose to sit down at a table, whether with one man or another, and work out any sort of campaign.” By way of pointing this last observation, Quail got to his feet. “But thank you for the tea.”
Jopling rose too. He had never been more urbane. “Well,” he said, “that’s a most interesting point of view. And I can see that you feel in a strong position; I can see that you feel yourself to have found the key to the whole affair. Now we’ll find my car.”
“Thank you very much – but I think I’ll walk. I came out for exercise, and didn’t in fact get much.”
“There’s much to be said for that too. And I hope you get about Oxford a good deal. Just as much as poor Tandon, you oughtn’t to be thinking of those journals and so forth all the time. Get about, my dear fellow, and in congenial society.” Jopling’s cordiality grew. “But then you do. I’m told you do. Capital, capital.”
Quail made enough of this to have no wish to be drawn on it. “Will it be all right, Warden, if I walk across the course? I don’t think I’ll hold people up.”
“Do, by all means. Now, what was I saying? Ah, yes—the younger sister. Slade lectures—eh?—and the Bach Choir! Have a care, my dear Quail. These violent delights have violent ends.” Jopling paused, giving himself for a moment to benevolent laughter. “Is it the cultivation of Miss Marianne’s mind that interests you – or is it what one may call her unemphatic charms?” Jopling stopped laughing, and his finger-tips hovered. “Did I say you had found the key to your affair? Skeleton key would perhaps be the better term . . . good-bye, good-bye!”
CHAPTER VII
It wasn’t in Quail to change course before a vulgar imputation; and a joke that seemed to turn on running a mental tape-measure round a lady decidedly wasn’t by his reckoning refined. Yet in some degree he did allow himself to be influenced by Jopling’s innuendo. It had been grossly impertinent; and the man who could make it to him would surely be perfectly capable of seeing that it was in some way conveyed to Marianne Fontaney as well. That Marianne should have to suspect that she was being taken up simply as part of a design against her sister and her sister’s property was a horrid possibility; and Quail saw no adequate insurance against it other than by now leaving it rather more to her to make the running. They had arrived on terms sufficiently familiar to render it perfectly natural that she should herself from time to time suggest something, at least by some tentative hint or enquiry, so that when he should at once vigorously take the idea up, there would be a pleasant sense of shared initiative and of meeting half-way.
In a moderate degree, this plan worked. Yet when she did make one or another slight approach, he on his part presently didn’t feel very sure about the motive involved. He found he couldn’t confidently suppose that her so much as strolling with him to the corner of the Banbury Road was simply done because she took pleasure in it. What he rather suspected was that she had penetrated to the way his own mind had been moving, and was making easier for him the judicious withdrawal he had planned by playing a little up to the new role he hoped she would assume.
In any case it didn’t all come to much, and more than a fortnight passed in which his contacts with her weren’t more than very casual. But even if they had been disposed to go about with their former incipient approach to freedom, there was now a circumstance that would have interfered. Miss Fontaney’s illness was increasing and she sometimes didn’t leave her room for several days on end. As the attendance of the person with the mop was a matter of very restricted hours, this put a brake upon any disposition to marked enterprise that Marianne might be forming.
It wasn’t very satisfactory. Quail’s conscience, indeed, was clear. He knew that he had never in the slightest degree used Marianne Fontaney, or addressed a word to her with the notion that she might serve as an instrument as well as exist as a person. Jopling’s suggestion had none of the potency of a half-truth, since it was in fact quite simply a lie. And again, he couldn’t believe that his new prudence, even if it meant the fading out of any substantial relationship with her at all, was going to thwart anything growing deep in himself. He hardly thought to consider whether he must, in the old-fashioned phrase, confess a warmth for Marianne. Such a notion would have been dead against long-settled habits of mind. Moreover, he would have had to admit – did delicacy ever permit him deliberately to meditate the matter – that behind the derogatory component of Jopling’s witticism there was a sort of crude physical substance, or rather lack of it. It was true, to put it very broadly, that Marianne Fontaney didn’t make any of the more obvious appeals.
But he did think highly of her. There was no doubt of that. He thought sufficiently highly of her to feel that her life was a bit of a shame. And – what made an irony for Quail – it was her father or her father’s ghost that did her injury. She had been taken to Italy because even in Italy, it is necessary to air beds; and she had lived on in the Bradmore Road because her elder sister had gone in for family piety in an inordinate way. This had been Quail’s distressing discovery; this was why he would now cheerfully see the whole place dispersed – late in the day though anything of the sort would now be. It would be very dreadful – this was his constant haunting thought – if in some way it all got at her again. His sense of how this could happen was vague; it might have been called a foreboding of a kind he didn’t at all commonly indulge in. She must never again – he put it to himself – be taken to Italy because of the beds.
But if she was now doing for her sister something of what she had done for her father in his decline, the duties of a sickroom, he was glad to see, didn’t look to be getting her down. He had a feeling, indeed, that she was gathering vitality as these weeks went by; and he even had the queer thought one day that if he were a novelist, he might be prompted to a fantasy based on this small increase of radiance, even of warmth, in one lamp as the flame sank in another. It might very well be that the doctors had told her something he didn’t know; that to Eleanor Fontaney’s life there was now an absolute term; and that Marianne was free to acknowledge to herself the certainty of change, and even a little to think of it in terms of liberation. Once or twice he caught her staring out through the window of the library at the front of the house in a glimpsed largeness of expectation which seemed unlikely to find its measure in anything due to appear in the Bradmore Road. And once or twice when he arrived for a morning’s labour in the same, for him, enchanted room, she would appear, almost before he could pull the bell, and throw open the absurdly mediaeval front door. And then, almost, she would seem disappointed, and he had to form the quaint theory that she had entered into correspondence with the house-agents of Hove, and must now lurk for the postman, in case the person with the mop should fatally convey part of the treasonable correspondence upstairs.
It was no doubt because her life remained for him so much a matter of conjecture, after all, and because there was always for him a sense of something undetermined in their relationship, that he particularly prized everything taken for granted between them. Often he would restrain his impatience to be at the journals, deferring his visit till the afternoon, since it had been established that then, when his watch told him it was half-past four, he had only to walk unbidden into the drawing-room and she would be there to give him tea. She might have very little t
o say, or might have to slip away quickly at her sister’s summons. But it pleased him to talk to her, if only for ten minutes. He didn’t back himself to do so with much sparkle, indeed, and sometimes he doubted whether the subjects he hit on were more germane to her own thoughts than unprovable theorems would have been. But he guessed that on many days she didn’t speak to another soul, and in such circumstances he hoped that even an elderly American was better than nothing. And as he still cherished his plan for their grand descent on London, it was on one of these occasions that he hoped, without breaking his new rule of caution, to broach it.
He was pursuing this small domestic ritual one day, and had got so far as to open the drawing-room door and cross the threshold, when he paused under the strong impression of an unforeseen variation. Marianne, in a plain light-coloured dress, was standing in a corner not familiar with her, and in conversation, he thought, with another lady. She turned, advanced towards him, and in the same instant the second figure disappeared. His perplexity was only for a moment. On the wall in the far corner hung one of Fontaney’s finest things: a high narrow French mirror for which Grinling Gibbons had carved a light but elaborate frame. The second lady had been only Marianne’s image in this. He had come upon her as she was consulting the glass.
But the tea-table stood as usual before the fireplace, and now without a word she took her usual chair. She had too her usual smile for him as she handed his cup – a smile, he always felt, made for features softer than Arthur Fontaney’s, so that here the effect was of some plastic conception imperfectly conveyed in a medium recalcitrant to the artist’s hand. Then she was gazing into the fire. “Have you a house?” she asked.
He was surprised. “You mean here—in England?”
“Yes – or in your own country. In America.”
“I certainly haven’t a house here. And, since my mother died, I no longer have a house in New York – only an apartment. And the old house of my father’s people in Boston – that’s gone, I’m sorry to say. I just hadn’t relations willing to live in it. The seaside house – the one I told you of at Newport – is still mine. But it’s a bit of a curiosity now.”
“A curiosity?”
“Rather large and quite hideous. It’s a product, I’m afraid, of an odd phase of pretentiousness in American culture. But I have a much pleasanter house in quite a different part of America, where I go sometimes to fish. And another, used mostly by my sister, on the Coast.”
“I see.” Marianne seemed rather bewildered by all this, and he couldn’t flatter himself that she was really feeling any curiosity about his circumstances. “It’s just that I find houses difficult to understand. Sometimes people own them entirely, and sometimes only on a lease. It seems this house belongs to one of the colleges, and the lease has about forty years to run.”
“I believe a lot of houses round about here are like that.” It occurred to him that Marianne, who must be conscious of the narrow circumstances to which she and her sister were already reduced, was supposing it her duty now to get a grip of how these matters stood. “And a house like this,” he went on, “with forty years to go, is still quite a marketable proposition.”
She nodded, but without speaking; and he felt that he hadn’t, after all, got at her line of thought. Was it possible that she felt other responsibilities coming to her too, and was cautiously approaching the subject of other sorts of property?
On a sudden impulse, he decided to broach this with her at once. “Since I’m afraid your sister’s really ill,” he said, “I think there are things I just ought to mention. It’s possible that your joint income isn’t large, and that even selling your lease here wouldn’t greatly improve matters. But the things your father collected have value.”
“Great value?”
“No, I’m afraid not.” He hesitated. “They’re many of them very lovely, but they wouldn’t – at least on an open market – fetch more than a few thousand pounds.”
“But that’s a very great deal!” Marianne was looking at him in astonishment – an astonishment which he recognised as shot with her remote intermittent mockery.
“You have to consider what it will bring you in the way of income.” He paused. Something had made him decide not to speak at present of the value of the journals. “You can rely on me,” he contented himself with saying, “at absolutely any time, for information or advice on that sort of thing. And ‘rely’ is quite a fair word. I am reliable.”
“Thank you. And I know you are.” For the first time in her ever addressing him, he thought he detected a note that was almost wistful in her voice. But at once she was laughing. “It’s so absurd,” she said, “not to know about—about houses, and the simplest things . . . of that kind.”
“No doubt your sister has done most of the managing?”
She nodded without speaking, and he found himself sitting back more comfortably, as if this small lack of formality was delightful. Her gaze had gone back to the fire; and, in a room falling into dusk, the flicker of the flame was at play on her complexion. He thought it had changed – not for the moment merely, but in some more or less permanent fashion. But he didn’t want to spy, and he, too, looked at the fire. “Oh, yes,” she was saying, “Eleanor has always arranged things. And I have always had complete confidence in her. That would be partly because I am so very much younger.” She stopped, and he saw her fingers close quickly on the handle of the teapot, as if in nervous response to the notion of having said something bold, indelicate. “And of course she is so clever,” she added. “A graduate.”
It seemed to him that it was in some far dimmer past than Marianne could possibly claim to have known that ladies were necessarily considered clever because they were graduates. He said rather formally: “I have a great respect for your sister’s intelligence.”
“Do you think her very old-fashioned?”
Quail was surprised, and for a moment didn’t know why. Then he realised that her sentence had contained an unexpected pronoun; he would have supposed that she would ask this question not about Eleanor only, but about both Eleanor and herself. “I certainly don’t judge her madly up-to-date,” he said – and had an instant sense that it was a long time since he had made such an evasive and foolish remark.
“Of course not. And she has some ideas—or ought I to say feelings?—that aren’t a bit . . . modern. About Americans, for instance.” Marianne added this hastily, rather as if she suddenly felt the need of a red herring to draw across a trail which in fact was invisible to him. “And even, you know, although our mother was American. She would rather—”
She had broken off, confused – so that he boldly helped her out. “You’re thinking of the journals?”
“Well—yes. I think Eleanor would rather they remained among . . . our father’s own countrymen. But you mustn’t be discouraged by that. It mayn’t be a strong feeling. So I think you may get them.”
He was delighted at the openness of this, and was frank in his turn. “You’d like me to?”
There was a little tinkle from the near darkness where her hands were moving; and he supposed that she had knocked over a cup. “I . . . don’t know.” There was something extraordinary in her voice. “But yes—oh, yes. I do, I do!”
He was staggered – and as he walked back to his hotel he realised that he was more puzzled than alarmed. It was as if she had suddenly made some momentous discovery; and as if that discovery ought to be notably clear to him, but was not.
CHAPTER VIII
But certainly Marianne Fontaney didn’t strike him as all mystery. The undisputed lordship or ladyship of a cottage by the sea couldn’t be an uncommon dream of spinsters whose youth was drawing away from them through long years of shared domesticity with relations. And when on a slightly later occasion Marianne returned to the subject of houses and seriously enquired whether persons in her station of life ever rented them or only bought them, he was convinced that the lure of Hove was growing. It was a small imagination in which he saw n
othing to quarrel with, particularly as the indulgence in it seemed to do her good. Her anxiety for Eleanor was deep, and her efforts for her must often have been exhausting. Yet there was something buoyant about Marianne. At times she could almost be felt as breathing in a new way, much as if the marine air was already in her lungs. And her eyes, too, were less on the ground; less on the anxiously-tended rooms and their stuffs and furnishings. Their focus suggested the sweep of distance. She might have been looking as far as the Channel’s blue horizon. She might have been looking as far as France.
He was the more pleased at every sign of wellbeing in Marianne, since with Tandon things appeared to be progressively going wrong. Quail had been by no means pleased with their parting after the misadventure on the golf-course; and it had been his resolve to get things clearer, if possible, by more definitely claiming the Senior Tutor as a fellow-worker who was also unquestionably a friend. He was determined that if Tandon was really to consider him as intriguing with Jopling, he should do so on no rational basis, but demonstrably as a consequence of being, for the time at least, a little wrong in the head. To have to come to anything like this conclusion would be distressing. But Quail was always for working things out in their true terms. He resolved to confront Tandon and insist on some straight talk.
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