‘This will destroy us—you do realise that?’
‘Will it?’ she asked lightly. Her wonder was momentarily transferred to the extraordinary intimacy of her home. Destroy us? she was about to repeat, staring about her at the prim suffocatingly familiar rooms. She had a vision of her mother and Mr Yockery. They were stomping into country-house gardens—uninvited, of course. They were fact-finding in churches; toiling away, dragging up the coconut matting to find matrices and being insolent to vergers—characters they always reckoned fair game. In the vestries Mr Yockery would nose into the registers to see exactly what was going on in a particular parish, and while he was doing this her mother would be fluffing out her bangs in the choirboys’ mirror. They would lunch at the local Trust House, where yet another kind of insolence would be found for the waiter. All this time the Alvis would be resting, not unlike a smart shrine, in the stripy shadow of nude beech trees. Her mother would then find that her vertigo was about to come on so she would lumber into the Alvis to rest and to smoke a Kensitas cigarette …
‘I suppose they will be out until dinner as they said?’ Richard asked.
‘Of course. When they go out it takes them all day.’
Meridian then, as if correctly interpreting their separate anxieties, adroitly reversed its message. For all the meaning the stepped set of Francis Towne water-colours on the staircase wall might have had for Mary—and she had seen them every day of her life—they could have arrived from Gimpel Fils that very morning. The frosted bell-shades on the electric light bulbs bloomed above her head like unfamiliar flowers. But for Richard it all became easily comprehensible. He was at the door of her bedroom and he found it neither strange, nor startling, nor out of the ordinary. When the door opened, alarm was suggested by yards and yards of filmy muslin bellying in from the window. He crossed and closed the sash.
‘Darling, I had no idea; you can see for miles. Arroby Bay—the Martello—the lighthouse on Hare Island. How lovely!’ He opened the window again, leaned out and saw the shutters, and pulled them to. A fine zebra darkness rode across their bodies and across the bed. It drew alternating parallels of desire and doubt across their faces. She heard his breathing, soft and regular, yet tearing into the quietness. He remained at the window with his back to her and said, ‘If I went away this minute you could be absolutely free; wholly yourself.’
‘No, don’t go. Not now.’
‘Then you do want me. You still might marry me?’
She laughed, casting into the sound all the embarrassment of her overwhelming sanity. Half-jokingly she asked, ‘Darling what on earth is it that you want—some kind of knightliness? And for me some kind of submission? Oh Richard!’
‘You know I would go on loving you,’ he insisted stubbornly.
‘I wasn’t doubting that side of things. I was thinking of marriage itself. Its routine, or whatever you like to call it. You would hate it wouldn’t you …’
‘Is that what Helen said? She told you that too?’
‘You’re worried about Helen, aren’t you! No, that happens to be my own conclusion.’
‘In that case we’re both of us mad!’
He turned to her and drew her uncertainly into his arms.
‘Perhaps we are. Then, her voice burying itself against his shoulder, ‘I shall never mind, Richard darling; ever, ever, ever. Can you understand? I shall never see us as two fools—or worse’.
Then she drew away and removed her necklace, her not very good, though still not imitation, pearls; the too-dutiful little warm tweed-rubbed pearls which carried with them all which Lafney had expected of her. They made her ‘Miss Crawford.’ They slithered with angry animation across the polished surface of her dressing-table. She stepped out of her shoes. Then with a half-choking protest at what she suddenly decided was an ugly, deliberate preparation, she vanished into the narrow additional dressing-room where there was nothing but shelves and shelves of books on Naval History and a spiky pile of jaunty French shoe-trees and hangers.
When she returned she found him sitting on her bed with his jacket off looking oddly, touchingly uncouth. He took her hands in his and she had a wild, almost ribald recollection of an Italian painting she had once seen in which a thin nervous Adam led a not so repentant Eve out of Eden.
In the unusually warm afternoon sunshine the crowded polyanthus down below in the fussy Meridian borders circulated their smell of musky, earthy velvet. In the house, the rooms, spoilt but still beautiful, ran into one another with aplomb and rectitude. Both garden and house exacted a security, a smug peace from the world.
Mary had always imagined that love, the act of love, was cloudy, sheltered; that with it ordinary comprehension died. Its deliberate brightness wracked her. She longed for the shades, the incomprehension, the warm, sweet, helpless indefiniteness she had hoped it to be. Her fingers dug themselves into the soft relaxed flesh of Richard’s arms so harshly that the hurt they gave was transmuted back to her in a pleading repetition of his name. The name, she saw, made no sense to him. He wheeled above her, white and deft as a bird, and with the same absence of pity. Presently she allied herself to his wild flouting of regard and was shocked to find that it was not until she had done this that tenderness crept in.
*
He woke stealthily, appreciating the conditions attached to waking, but hesitant to accept them. His left arm was as cold as stone. And as unfeeling. He tried to draw it in, to re-unite it to himself, but nothing happened, except a tiny thread of pain—hardly pain at all—the minute and wayward protest of a nerve. The arm which was his, but was dead, ran across the pillows like stripped willow, damply cold and clean. Mary’s head laid across it. Her mouth was compressed and mildly distorted with sleep. The skin near her temples glistened. The arm at last came free. She did not wake. He kissed her breast and still she did not wake. I have loved, he thought. His hand rested at the timorous softness of her waist. With closed eyes, scarcely breathing, she asked.
‘What is the time, darling? Can you see?’
He saw it on her own watch which she still wore.
‘Twenty-to-five?’ she echoed in alarm.
They hung together, trying to work out such an hour; to make it reasonable, believable. Twenty-to-five when? On what day? In what year? In whose lifetime? They were eaten up by the silence. He began to kiss her again and it seemed no more than a second later that St Prolixia’s chimed five.
When Richard had gone downstairs Mary flew around getting her room how it usually was. Everything in it looked violated. The mounted sheepskin rugs her father had brought back from Tasmania were rucked into ranges. The silk lampshades were rakish. Books, ornaments—all seemed to have been disturbed. But nothing confronted her with resentment. instead there was a gay, wilful insolence in the disorder. She opened the shutters. Richard walked on the terrace. His hair was blown up in a crest. Every now and then he looked up, but carefully not at her window. At last she ran from the bedroom to reach him and there in the first hall encountered the contained figure of Mr Yockery.
‘Ha! Where’s the fire, eh?’ He blocked her way jocosely.
‘Dick’s in the garden,’ her mother said, heaving herself up the three front steps. Lorgnettes swung convulsively from her chain, still pregnant with all they had magnified. The car seat had caused her skirt to concertina up. Other than this she looked wonderfully well-kept. Both she and Mr Yockery were strung-up by the day’s proceedings to a pitch of mildly malicious levity. ‘Did you give him some lunch? You did? Good. We had a lovely time.’
Over her mother’s shoulder Mary saw Richard coming in from the terrace. They had not surprised him. He had seen the Alvis turn in from the road. ‘Everything’s changed … everything’s different!’ he’d felt like shouting at them, because of the complacency of their jolting bodies. ‘Why do you behave as though you are coming back to the same old smug situation?’ He looked at Mary, enclosed like him in the ruthless weakness of after-love, knowing himself to be fragile, yet not vulnerable.
They were a honeycomb. They held the sun of Lafney and were drained of its sediment. Mrs Crawford however, only saw them as they had been. She dumped her fur on a chest and demanded tea. Her make-up lay in silver lines in the deep crevasses of her stout handsome face. She and Mr Yockery were exchanging looks of an appalling tolerance. Their ‘understanding’, Mary saw, was being brought into play. Richard said he must go. Mrs Crawford’s broad shoulders swung round.
‘Go? My dear boy …’
‘I think so, Mrs Crawford.’
She looked at him, telling herself, ‘sweet’. Then she pushed him into the compartment of her mind she kept for basically harmless young men of her on-furlough-from-Africa kind. She prided herself that she knew his type and its stagnating decency. Safe as houses.
‘You won’t forget to tell your mother about that meeting!’
But it was Mr Yockery who had the last word.
‘What do you think? We passed Quentin. He was just leaving the station. Waved us on, or we’d have given him a lift …’
*
At the gate, or just before they got to it—Mary had walked down from the house with him—they kissed for the last time. She was being infinitely right and just; he understood that. But she had defeated him. He had convinced her of desire only. She still retained her code, and her code, trivial as it might seem to him to be, excluded her complete acceptance of him. She had once thought of marriage and now would never think of it again—with him at anyrate. It was all past anger or argument. His chief feeling was a buried, incommunicable sadness. The sadness reached up from his stomach into his throat, like the sadness children experience when other children shrug them off.
‘You ought to go. Won’t they be waiting for you?’
She said, ‘Yes they will.’
‘And will I be waiting for you?—I ask because you have grown so clairvoyant in such matters.’
‘Let me see,’ she said, playing his game. ‘No, Dick darling, my glass somehow tells me that you might not be.’
‘You’re sure—?’
‘I am—and you will be. One day.’
‘Goodbye then.’
He pressed her hands which hung heavily in his.
A few yards past the swing-gate which led to the back of Meridian, he thought he heard his own name. He turned quickly and saw a fat gull landing with prodigious dignity on the groundsel-fringed wall.
16
EDWINA was destroying a mosaic. The mosaic, crab-pink and macaroni-grey, stretched for some feet before the front door of The Portway. Frosts and moles had buckled it, but it was not for such a reason that Edwina was prising it up. For years she had loathed it with all her heart. The house was empty. Good, she had thought selfishly. Dick had gone off somewhere. It would have been all the same if she had got a proper lunch. Florence Crawford wouldn’t call; not now. She glanced at her watch. Gone five! She shovelled up the last pailful of hideous clinking tesserae. When she looked round it was to see with amazement that Quentin stood just behind her. He was poking the damp, wormy scar where the mosaic had been with the ferrule of his umbrella. It may have been the umbrella which made her think of Quentin as an undergraduate again. Whatever it was, for the moment she was quite overwhelmed by the sight of the touchingly youthful figure he made with his black hair thrust out in a sheltering eave above his neat pale forehead and his not very good suit tangled into Quentin’s own special brand of elegance.
‘Quenny! You never said.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘But how wonderful!’
‘Where’s Dick? He is home isn’t he?’
‘Not at the moment. He’s with Mary Crawford.’
Quentin looked relieved.
‘But what are you doing, Mum? When did you decide to become an archaeologist? Has Father Yock been getting at you? And, if I may say so, what a mess!’
Edwina, looking at the bed upon which the mosaic had lain, a black indecent bed, blindly proliferous with rushing insects and crawling convolvulous runners, was apt to agree.
‘Worse than before?’ she asked.
Quentin scrawled his name in the dirt, then scrabbled it out with revulsion. He considered. ‘Perhaps not. But what now?’
‘Shingle. But I’m not going to do that today. I’d better get tea. Stella’s in Ipswich, but she’s coming home about seven and Richard—but I told you about Richard, didn’t I?’
‘You said he was at Meridian.’
Edwina realised that Quentin wished to be certain about this. Was there something to be explained to Richard then? Something which could have brought Quentin home so suddenly?
She looked at him carefully when she thought he wouldn’t notice. He waited in the stamp-size morning-room and she saw him reduced by the three receding arches of the doors which led from the kitchen, a narrow Orpen young man who was choosing for reasons of his own to present only his shadow to the world. She bustled through in a manner calculated to make him irritable—he was always more expansive when he was rattled—dumped the tray down and herself beside it.
‘Now,’ she demanded, ‘Why are you home like this, Quenny—without a word to anyone?’
‘Don’t I often?’ he protested, which was true enough.
‘How is Mr Munsen-Orle?’ Edwina persisted.
‘Frightfully well. He sends you his love.’
‘Goodness, does he!’
‘It may have been his respects. Mum, supposing I left March; what would you say?’
‘Well supposing you did?’ Edwina answered, playing for time.
‘You wouldn’t mind …?’
‘I’d mind terribly. But as it would mean that you’d got a better post it would be silly of, wouldn’t it? You see, March has become familiar to me, darling. And you are getting on so well there.’
She sensed his mind working in some schoolmasterly way as though he were making an effort to reframe an already over-simplified question to a rather limited intelligence. Edwina had endured this kind of thing before and found it maddening. But she was so shaken by what Quentin said next that she made no effort to be anything other than the slight booby he occasionally made her out to be.
‘We’ll put it this way shall we darling. If I gave up teaching altogether—would you mind?’
Then Richard walked in. He hardly seemed to see Quentin, who at once began to invent a hasty resentment that his being in Lafney wasn’t a greater surprise to more people.
Immediately Edwina had left the room to get a cup for Richard, Quentin said, ‘I’ve got to see you. It’s urgent.’
‘Oh—?’
‘You’ve got to be serious.’
‘I’m as serious today as I’ll ever be.’
Quentin queried this. Anyway, beyond making sure of his attention at this point, Richard’s life interested him very little. His own apprehensions and hopes soared to such a fantastic precedence over the plans of other people it made him see life intensely personally. It wasn’t quite selfishness. That would be a crude interpretation of his inverted interests. His preoccupation with being Quentin tallied with the preoccupation of an artist at a certain pitch of creativity. In his way he was producing himself. Every stop, every nuance of the Quentin manual had to be extended and sounded to its ultimate advantage. He was the least self-apologetic individual that could possibly be met with. Eventually, life being what it is, Quentin’s present tolerable gaiety, his fascinatingly strung-up, over-exposed individualism would warp. Go awry. At forty he would most likely be detestable. It was only the fact that Quentin himself occasionally showed signs of knowing that such a thing could happen which lent him a sort of pathos in the eyes of certain people—Mary especially. In fact, if she were truthful with herself she would agree that it was Quentin who had made her have second thoughts about Richard. But now Quentin was looking at Richard and seeing that he was not quite the same. Something had happened. Richard had changed. Quentin was intrigued.
‘Could you put off what you were doing this evening, Dick?’
&nb
sp; ‘Easily. I had no intentions.’
‘Aren’t you what they used to call “sought after”?’
‘Who have you been talking to—some ghastly old gossip?’
‘No—not unless that is your idea of Sir Paul.’
‘Richard was going to see Sir Paul about something or other tomorrow, weren’t you Richard,’ Edwina said, returning with another plate and cup.
Richard, staring straight past his mother at Quentin, said quietly. ‘That’s right. I’m going to Sheldon on the early train. Sir Paul is offering me a job.’
Even more quietly, the pianissimo of altercation, Quentin replied, ‘I’m here to talk about that. There has been some kind of alteration—although I did understand nothing had been absolutely fixed.’
He rose and balanced himself on the revolving piano-stool. He played a smart little Milhaud tune. ‘Munsen-Orle adores Milhaud already,’ he explained. His fingers faltered wittily.
‘Do you mean that there is no need for me to go to Sheldon—again?’ Richard asked, heavily, but still not loudly.
A Treasonable Growth Page 32
