‘Cheers,’ said Miss Stevenson, at which schoolgirl exclamation Mary raised her eyebrows, which, though Joan didn’t see it, gave her great inward satisfaction, and nerved her for further conflict.
David had left the choice of pudding to his guests. Joan asked, in what Mary considered a very affected accent, for crêpe Suzette. This gave Mary a good opening to say that, thank you, David dear, she had simply gorged and couldn’t eat any more, but might she just have coffee and perhaps a fine with it. Fine was rather a shot in the dark, but to her great relief it appeared to be correct, and her self-esteem perked up its head still further.
‘Madame’s crêpe will take a few minutes,’ said the waiter.
‘Cigarette?’ said David, offering his case to Joan, who took one, and then to Mary.
‘No, thanks, David. You ought to know by now that I don’t smoke. Don’t you think it spoils one’s palate for good drink?’ she asked Joan politely. At the same moment her satisfaction burst and collapsed. David ought to have remembered that she didn’t smoke, considering how much they had been together lately. It was heartless of him to forget like that, and now she had given herself away to that horrid smart woman, who would think that David had never noticed whether she smoked or not. She would like to explain to her that David had really offered her a cigarette not from forgetfulness, but because he didn’t want to emphasise his intimacy with Mary and his mere friendliness with Joan. Also she had been a fool to say anything so crude about smoke spoiling one’s palate. It was true it was a nasty and a satisfactory slap in the eye for that Miss Stevenson after all the fuss she had made about the wine, but it should have been more delicately done.
David talked about his novel till the crêpe came, when Mary, though wishing she was eating one too, at least had the satisfaction of seeing the enemy more or less gagged by food, while she was able to talk to David about his book with the understanding of one who has been present at the inception of an Idea. David was also having coffee and a fine, which was another snub to Miss Stevenson and a bond between Mary and David.
They sat on talking for a little. David mentioned a ballet which Mary hadn’t seen. Joan had seen it in Paris. David mentioned a symphony which Joan hadn’t heard. Mary had heard Toscanini conduct it, though she omitted to say it was on a gramophone. Joan mentioned a banned book. David knew a man who had bought fifty copies in France and smuggled them over in an aeroplane, but Mary was here inspired to say that she had read it in typescript and found it simply dull. Why people were persuaded to read crashingly dull books just because they were banned, she really could not think. For this appalling lie fire from heaven should have descended on her, but as nothing happened, she was defiantly glad that she had told it and shown that she was really in things just as much as that Miss Stevenson.
‘Well, I almost envy you your chance of reading all those horrid books,’ said Miss Stevenson, getting up. ‘I have to go back to work now. Are you coming my way, David?’
‘I suppose we are going to our cinema, David,’ said Mary, planting a last barb in the enemy’s breast. ‘We could drop Miss Stevenson.’ That at least should rankle.
‘Will you mind frightfully if we don’t?’ said David. ‘I want to see a man about my novel, and I know I’ll find him at the Café Royal till half-past three.’
The blood of many generations of soldiers ran in Mary’s veins. Inclining graciously towards Joan, she said:
‘Could I take you anywhere? I have the car.’
Nor was Joan wanting in the stoicism of the Red Indian who makes no sound while his sinews are torn from him. She accepted with becoming gratitude. David saw them both into the car.
‘Goodbye, Joan. I’ll look you up soon,’ he said. ‘I’ve an idea about your holiday. Goodbye, Mary. I’ll be down tomorrow.’
Both ladies gave him frozen smiles and murmured something unintelligible. Luckily the journey only lasted a few minutes. Miss Stevenson thanked Mary for the lift, and both ladies mentioned how glad they were to have met each other.
‘Beg pardon, miss,’ said Weston, as he put the dust rug over Mary’s knees, ‘Mr Leslie asked me to call at Mr John’s office after lunch for a letter. Will that be all right?’
‘Certainly, Weston.’
They drove into the city and stopped at a building in a dark, narrow street. John happened to be going in as they drew up.
‘I’ve come for a letter for Mr Leslie, sir,’ said Weston.
‘Mary, what a charming surprise. Will you come up and see my office while I finish Father’s business? I shan’t be long, Weston.’
Mary saw no reason not to, so she went upstairs with John, whose office, being exactly like any other office, we need not describe. It is enough to say that it had a large window of frosted glass looking on to a wall, on that hot day it was almost airless, the furniture was bleak and efficient, the tear-off calendar was several days in arrears.
‘Sit down,’ said John. ‘How’s everyone?’
‘Very well. Clarissa has got another back tooth and Nannie has had to give Ivy a piece of her mind.’
‘What did Agnes say?’
‘“Oh, Nannie, how annoying of Ivy.”’
Mary imitated Agnes’s plaintive voice so exactly that John began to laugh.
‘I’ll just finish my letter,’ he said, ‘and then I’ll show you the rest of the place if you like. It isn’t much of a show, but I am thinking of moving if things go on well.’
He rang for his secretary and began dictating a letter to her. Mary looked about her, but finding no entertainment her thoughts naturally returned to the battlefield of lunch. It had been the most horrible lunch she had ever had. In spite of scoring several distinct hits, she only felt lowered in her own esteem. She had been spiteful, affected, a liar and a prig. She hated that Joan person more than anything on earth except David, who was perfectly horrible. Asking her up to town, expecting her to come by the ridiculously early train, inviting a strange woman who put on airs to meet her and—Then the most horrible thought of all, which she had not yet thought of adding to her grievances, came thundering over her mind. There had been no wild strawberries. It was to have been her own special party for wild strawberries brought by air twice a week from the Tyrol or somewhere, and David hadn’t so much as thought of them. But he had let that girl choose her own pudding, the greedy pig. It was true that he had offered her a pudding too, and she might have said wild strawberries if she hadn’t been so stupidly snobbish, pretending she couldn’t eat any more. But that didn’t in the least affect the awful, heart-rending fact that he had entirely forgotten his promise.
‘Get that typed at once, Miss Badger,’ said John, ‘and put those papers in with it and bring it in here when it is ready. No,’ he added, as she left the room, ‘I’ll ring for it in about ten minutes.’
For as he turned from his table to his guest, he saw her sitting upright in the office armchair with tears pouring down her face.
As the secretary shut the door, Mary looked up with a start.
‘Oh,’ she said in a desolate voice, trying to dab her tears away. But nothing would check them now, nor indeed did she much want to check them, it was such a blessed relief to dissolve all one’s past wickedness in tears, to wash away the splinter of glass in one’s heart that had made one behave so disgracefully. And John didn’t matter.
John stood with his hands in his pockets in considerable perplexity. Why Mary Preston should come into his office in excellent spirits and be discovered ten minutes later in tears was a mystery to him. The only probable explanation was that she had suddenly felt unhappy, and he only hoped it wasn’t his fault. He hastily reviewed his conduct for the past quarter of an hour. He had seen Mary in his father’s car, and on an impulse had asked her to come upstairs. They had walked up together to the first floor. Here he had taken her straight into his own office and given her the chair which was officially the most comfortable one. She had then given him a short account of the nursery at Rushwater, and a very goo
d imitation of his sister Agnes. No cause for tears in all this. Had he perhaps been rude in sending for his secretary almost at once and dictating a letter? No, she had come up quite realising that he wanted to finish a letter which she was to take down to Mr Leslie. So, being no further on than he had been a minute earlier, he took the plunge and diffidently asked her what the matter was. Mary, her face slightly mottled with emotion, replied in a low, choked voice:
‘David’s lunch.’
This did not make matters much clearer. If she were poisoned she would be writhing and fainting, not shedding a steady rain of tears. In any case it would be extremely unlike David to poison anyone. The kind of restaurant he went to might surfeit people, but would be above poisoning them.
‘What happened at lunch?’ he asked. ‘I mean, I don’t want to ask questions, but I must do something to help you. You can’t go on like this.’
‘Oh, can’t I?’ said Mary in a thick voice. ‘Well, I jolly well can. Unless,’ she added, with a sudden and touching humility, ‘you have anyone coming to see you here. If you have, I’ll rush down into the car. I could quite well finish crying there.’
‘No one will come in here,’ said John, ‘till I ring. And I want you to stay here till you feel happier. Don’t bother to tell me if it makes you unhappy. Only if it’s anything to do with David, perhaps I could help.’
Thus encouraged, Mary gave a great gulp and rubbed her eyes with the small damp ball which had been her handkerchief. John pulled a chair up to her and sat down, as if he were a doctor preparing to hear a patient’s symptoms.
‘You see,’ said Mary, whose utterance became clearer with every word and whose complexion was reassuming a more uniform tinge, ‘David promised to take me out to lunch and give me wild strawberries. He knew a place where they get them sent over from the Tyrol or somewhere twice a week. So your father very kindly lent me the car and I did your mother’s shopping and then I went to lunch with David – and he had forgotten about the strawberries.’
Upon which she made a sound resembling that usually written as boo-hoo.
‘How rotten of him,’ said John. ‘But you must have some another day. Tell him to take you out again, and rub it in well how low and caddish his behaviour has been.’
‘There will be no other day,’ announced Mary, to whose voice her late excesses had imparted a fine resonant timbre.
John looked startled. The whole situation was becoming alarmingly melodramatic. Surely the girl was not quarrelling with David because the young ass, who was as selfish in his pleasant way as anyone John knew, had forgotten to give her wild strawberries. One didn’t quarrel with a cousin by marriage on such meagre grounds. Then into John’s mind came a little spiky thought. One didn’t burst into tears over such a trifle unless one were very fond of a person. Could it possibly be a kind of lovers’ quarrel that David and Mary had had? He had not been down to Rushwater himself since the weekend of Mary’s arrival, but he had an idea from his mother’s letters that David had been there a good deal. Had David been philandering as usual? John felt a rush of annoyance with his younger brother, an annoyance which he at once recognised as unreasonable, but could not control. Hadn’t David enough charming friends without having to try his hand on this girl with the clear, small voice? What David needed was a rough shaking and a little responsibility.
‘Have you and David had a row?’ he hazarded.
‘Oh, no,’ said Mary, in an airy way which deceived no one, certainly not herself, for she added penitently, ‘At least, David has been most thoughtless and unkind, but I have been a liar and very rude, so we are about equal.’
‘Tell me about your being rude,’ said John, hoping that to talk about herself would be the quickest cure.
Mary looked steadily at him, and apparently given confidence by what she saw continued:
‘Well, you’ll think me very silly, but when I got to the place where we were to have lunch, David said he had asked someone called Miss Stevenson, and I was disappointed because it was to have been just us. And she was a horrid woman who had been at college and does something about broadcasting, and I hated her. And then however much I tried to be nice it came out like rudeness, and I hated myself more and more and I hated David. And it was all so silly and I am so dreadfully ashamed and I shan’t know what to say to David.’
John couldn’t tell her that David, if he knew his younger brother, would be unconscious of anything beyond the fact that he had taken two presentable young women out to lunch, that he would not for a moment realise how much his promise of wild strawberries had meant to Mary. Nothing so definite as warning Mary that no one had ever yet penetrated David’s armour of egoism occurred to him, but he felt that no one was taking care of the girl properly. She ought not to be in a position where David could treat her as he treated the many charming girls whom he admired.
‘Will Weston mind being kept waiting?’ Mary asked anxiously, while she repaired some of the ravages of grief.
‘Not a bit. If you start by four o’clock you will have plenty of time. Did my father come up to town too?’ he asked. ‘No, how stupid of me, he would have called for the letter himself.’
‘Oh, no, David wanted me to come up by that early train from Rushwater, and I had a lot of shopping to do for Aunt Emily, so Mr Leslie said I might have the car, for which I was very grateful, because it was a treat and made me much less tired.’
‘How like Father,’ said John. But his unsaid thought was, how like David. He had evidently taken it for granted that Mary would get up at some unearthly hour and take that slow, early train, which John himself knew well and loathed, and then carry an armful of parcels about London, just for the pleasure of having lunch with him. David’s whole scale of values was wrong. He was so used to thinking in terms of expensive girls who had their own cars and thought nothing of motoring a hundred miles to have a meal with him that he could not realise how different Mary was – or didn’t want to. He wished that David were there now so that he could give him what Nannie called a piece of his mind, but at the same time he knew it would be quite useless and that David would inevitably disarm him by his ingenuous surprise and charming contrition. Too much charm altogether, he thought.
‘I believe a cup of tea is what most restores females,’ said John, ringing. ‘Is that the letter, Miss Badger? Thanks. And can you get some tea for Miss Preston and me?’
‘Isn’t it rather early for tea?’ said Mary.
‘It is half-past three. Miss Badger has tea in her room every day from three o’clock onwards. The tea is good, I see to that. And we rather affect an Abernethy biscuit in our office. Does that meet your views?’
Miss Badger shortly produced tea on a tray. Mary, partaking of it, was much refreshed in body and mind.
‘I was an awful idiot,’ she said. ‘I expect it was really drinking that Snake in the Grass cocktail that David gave me. Did he tell you that he got turned down at Broadcasting House? They gave him an audition or whatever they call it, for reading English poetry aloud, and he chose that bit of Milton he read us when you were there, and he laughed so much that he couldn’t go on, so it wasn’t—’
Here she quite suddenly stopped. Her face went bright pink, her mouth remained slightly open, and her general appearance was that of one struck with madness. John was seriously alarmed. A fit of crying was a reasonable affair, but why the mention of David’s Milton reading should induce paralysis and insanity, he couldn’t conceive. The child couldn’t be dazzled by David to such an extent that to speak of him made her self-conscious. Then Mary, gazing dumbly at John, saw a tide of colour mount to his face also. He tried to speak, but only produced a kind of click. Silent agony pervaded the room till Mary, with burning cheeks and her voice almost as inaudible as it had been half an hour ago, managed to say:
‘I said something frightfully stupid that night David was reading. I don’t know if you heard it and if you didn’t, don’t ask me about it, but if you did, please forgive me, because I hadn’t t
he very faintest idea.’
‘As a matter of fact I did hear, but please don’t think I minded. You were perfectly right about Milton. No one in their senses could have thought of marrying such an exasperating widower, and as I am, thank heaven, not in the least like Milton, I don’t see that there can be any comparison. Besides, the world is full of widowers, and if no one was to mention Milton, or, for that matter, Henry the Eighth, what would we all talk about?’
Mary’s face relaxed and she gave a sigh of relief. John’s kindness, as also his courage in mentioning that somehow almost funny word widower, was tremendous.
‘Thanks most awfully,’ she said. ‘And I am so very sorry about Mrs Leslie, if you don’t mind my saying so. Aunt Agnes told me how darling she was. I do so wish she hadn’t—’
She stopped again, feeling foolish. What business was it of hers to intrude on John’s past? And how utterly stupid what she was going to say. But John apparently hadn’t minded.
‘So do I,’ he said. ‘In fact, I wish it all the time. But she did. You must let Agnes talk to you about her. Agnes in a way came closer to her than even my mother did. If it hadn’t been for Agnes’s kindness I could hardly have borne it when Gay died.’
‘Aunt Agnes is kind to everyone. It was the greatest luck in the world that Uncle Robert married her. I think one is very grateful for kindness,’ she added musingly. But whether she was thinking of Agnes’s kindness or of John’s, who can say? John wondered if she was thinking of David; the thought of kindness might lead one to think of unkindness. Then he blamed himself for the thought.
He took Mary downstairs and put her into the car. Then he went back to the office, from which the good Miss Badger had efficiently removed the tea things, and went on with his work. Between six and half past he rang David up at his flat and found him in.
Wild Strawberries: A Virago Modern Classic (VMC) Page 10
