by C. P. Snow
“Muriel,” she cried excitedly, “did you see that Houston has got a CBE?”
“No, Doris,” said Lady Muriel with finality. “I never read as low in the list as that.”
Roy joined us and made a hearty tea.
“I must say, Roy,” said Lady Muriel in due course, with heavy-footed casualness, “that you’re looking very well.”
It happened to be true. Roy smiled at her.
“So are you, Lady Mu,” he said demurely.
“Am I?” Lady Muriel was thrown out of her stride.
“I have never seen you look better,” Roy assured her. “Coming back to the scene of your conquests, isn’t it?”
“You’re a very naughty young man.” Lady Muriel gave her crowing laugh. Then she remembered her duty, and stiffened. “You’re looking very well, Roy,” she began again. “Have you by chance had any good news?”
“Any good news, Lady Mu?”
“Anything really exciting?”
Roy reflected.
“One of my investments has gone up three points since Christmas,” he said. “I wonder if it could be that?”
Lady Muriel plunged desperately.
“I suppose none of our friends are getting engaged just now, are they?”
“I expect they are,” said Roy. “But I haven’t seen The Times. There’s always a batch on New Year’s Day, isn’t there? I wonder why? Could I borrow The Times, Mrs Seymour?”
Under Lady Muriel’s baffled eyes, Roy worked down a column and a half of engagements. He took his time over it. There were nearly fifty couples in the paper; and the party at tea knew at least a third of them by name, and half-a-dozen personally.
“There you are, Lady Mu,”said Roy at last. “I’ve put a cross against two or three. Those are the ones you need to write to.”
Lady Muriel gave up.
“By the way,” Roy asked, “is anyone going to the ballet tonight?”
We all said no.
“I think we will go,” said Roy. “I think I should take Rosalind.”
13: A Complaint of Elusiveness
Roy did not, however, find it pleasant to fend off the Master. Lady Muriel made her “tactful enquiries” on the Saturday afternoon; next morning, the Master, Roy and I went for a walk along the hill road. The Master used no finesse; he asked no questions with a double meaning: he walked briskly between us, upright and active as a young man, breathing confidential whispers about Cambridge acquaintances, but he let it be seen that he felt Roy’s silence was a denial of affection.
Roy was in a difficult position. For he was not cherishing a secret. He had not proposed to Rosalind. Yet it was awkward to contradict the rumour. For he guessed, as I had, that Rosalind had set it going herself.
He was not willing to put her to shame. He was too fond of women to romanticise them. He knew she was determined to marry him, and would, if she thought it useful, lie and cheat and steal until she brought it off. He did not think the worse of her. Nor did he think the worse of Lady Muriel because, if she could lie in ambush in the dark and cease to be a great lady, she would with relish have pulled Rosalind’s hair out by the roots. He was fond of them all. But for Rosalind he felt the special animal tenderness that comes from physical delight, and he would not consent to see her humiliated among those who hated her.
So there was nothing for it but to take her round Monte Carlo, dine with her each night, ignore all hints and questions, and go on as though the rumour did not exist.
But I did not believe for a minute that Rosalind would win: she had miscalculated completely if she thought those were the best tactics. Probably she knew that, whatever happened, he would not give her away before the Royces and the Boscastles. Down to a certain level, she understood him well. But below that, I thought, she must be living with a stranger, if she imagined that she could take him by storm.
We turned back down the hill. In the distance, down below the white patches of houses, the sea shone like a polished shield. I made an excuse and stayed behind, taking off a shoe, so that they could have a word together. I watched their faces turn to each other, their profiles sharp against the cloudless sky. The Master was talking, Roy listening, they were near together, their faces were softened by seriousness and intimacy. In profile Roy’s nose ran too long for beauty: the Master looked more regularly handsome, with trim clear lines of forehead, chin and mouth; his skin had been tinged a little by the January sun, and he seemed as healthy as Roy, and almost as young.
After we had seen his car drive away in the direction of Roquebrune, I said to Roy: “What did he ask you?”
“He didn’t ask me anything. But he told me something.” Roy was smiling, a little sadly.
“What?”
“He told me that, if ever I thought of getting married, I was to consider nothing but my own feelings. It was the only occasion in life when one needed to be absolutely selfish in one’s choice. Otherwise one brings misery to others as well as to oneself.”
Roy looked at me.
“It cost him an effort to say that,” he said. “It was brave of him.”
He added, as though off-handedly: “You know, old boy, if he had let himself go he could have had a high old time with the women. It’s almost not too late for him to start.”
Roy spoke with the deep and playful ease of a profound personal affection. For his relation with the Master had nothing of the strain that comes between a protégé and his patron – where all emotion is ambivalent, unless both parties are magnanimous beyond the human limits: if they are ordinary humans, there is the demand for gratitude on one side, resentment on the other, and those forces must drive them further apart. Roy’s feeling was different in kind. It was deep, it had nothing to do with their positions. It was more like a successful younger brother’s for an elder who has had a bad time. And underneath there was a strong current of loving envy; for, whatever had happened to the Master, his essential self had been untouched. He might regret that he had done little, he might be painfully lonely, but in his heart there was repose. Roy envied him, even that morning, when he was himself free of any shadow; in the dark nights Roy envied him passionately, above all for his simple, childish faith in God. He was cynical in his speech, sceptical in his human reflections, observant and disinterested: how had he kept that faith?
The Boscastle cars were busy that day, carrying out guests for lunch, bringing them back; and one called in the afternoon for Roy, Rosalind and me. Rosalind was spectacular in black and white.
“I’ve worn ten different outfits in four days,” she said. “Do you think this will get by?”
She was excited, full of zest, apprehensive but not too much so to enjoy herself. She exclaimed rapturously as we drove round the beautiful stretch of coast. It did not matter to her that it had been praised before. She thought it was romantically beautiful; she said so, and gasped with pleasure.
Both the dress and Rosalind “got by” with Lord Boscastle. Lady Boscastle was delicately polite, Lady Muriel gave what she regarded as a civil greeting; but Lord Boscastle was an obstinate man, and here was a decorative young woman asking only to sit at his feet and be impressed. He was happy to oblige. Her taste in dress might be bold, but she was incomparably better turned out than any of the women of his party, except his own wife. And each time he met her, he felt her admiration lapping round him like warm milk. He felt, as other men felt in her presence, a size larger than life.
He placed her in the chair next to his. Tea was brought in.
“I’m afraid I’m not much good at tea,” said Lord Boscastle to Rosalind, as though it were a very difficult game. “But I expect you are, aren’t you?” He pressed her to take some strawberry jam. “From my house,” he said. “We grow a few little things at my house, you know.”
Roy, sitting between Lady Muriel and Joan, was watching with the purest glee. It did not need his prompting that afternoon to send Lord Boscastle through his hoops.
“We have always grown a few things at my h
ouse,” said Lord Boscastle.
“Have you, Lord Boscastle?” said Rosalind.
They discussed the horticultural triumphs of the house for the past two hundred years, Lord Boscastle taking all the credit, Rosalind giving him all the applause.
Then he remembered a displeasing fact. “The trouble is,” he said to her, “that one never knows who is coming to live near one’s house nowadays. I heard from my steward only today that someone is going to squat himself down ten miles away. His name appears to be” – Lord Boscastle reached for a letter and held it at arm’s length – “Woolston. A certain Sir Arthur Woolston.”
He pronounced the name with such painful emphasis that Lady Muriel and the rest of us waited for his next words.
“I’m afraid I don’t know the fellow,” he said. “I think,” he added, in a tone of tired dismissal, “I think he must be some baronet or other.”
He stared across at his sister, and said: “I suppose you probably know him, Muriel.”
“I have never heard of him,” Lady Muriel replied in dudgeon. Then, using the same technique, she turned on her sister-in-law: “Or is he some sort of lawyer? Would your father have known him, Helen?”
“I scarcely think so,” said Lady Boscastle.
“Don’t I remember one of your father’s cases having something to do with the name of Woolston?”
“Perhaps you do, Muriel,” said Lady Boscastle, smiling with charm and sarcasm. “In that case you remember more than I.”
A moment later, Lady Boscastle said to me: “It is such a beautiful sunset, Lewis. I should like to take a little walk in the garden. Will you come with me, my dear?”
She rang for her maid, who brought her coat and wraps and dressed her. She took my arm, leaned on me, and her stick tapped slowly along the terrace. It was a magnificent evening. The sun had already set behind the hills, but the sky above was a startling luminous green, which darkened to velvet blue and indigo, so dense that it seemed tangible, as one looked over the sea towards Italy. The lights of Mentone sparkled across the water, and the first stars had come out.
“Had I told you that my father was a barrister, Lewis?” said Lady Boscastle.
“No, never,” I said.
“It may have made me more interested in you, my dear boy,” she said.
She told me his name; he had been an eminent chancery lawyer, some of whose cases I had studied for my Bar examinations. It came as a complete surprise to me. Rather oddly – so it seemed to me later – I had never enquired about her history. Somehow I had just assumed that she was born in the Boscastle circle. She had acclimatised herself so completely, she was so much more fine-grained than they, so much more cultivated, so much more sophisticated. No one could be more exquisite and “travelled”; she told me of the sweetness of life which she and her friends had known, and, far more than Lord Boscastle or Lady Muriel, made me feel its graces; she had been famous in Edwardian society, she had been loved in the last days of the old world.
But she had not been born in that society. She had been born in a comfortable place, but not there. When I knew, I could understand how she and Lady Muriel scored off each other. For Lady Boscastle, detached as she was, was enough child of her world not to be able to dismiss Lady Muriel’s one advantage; she knew she was far cleverer than Lady Muriel, more attractive to men, more certain of herself; but still she remembered, with a slight sarcastic grimace, that Lady Muriel was a great aristocrat and she was born middle-class.
It might also explain, I thought, why sometimes she was more rigid than her husband. When, for example, it was a question of inviting Rosalind, and she spoke for the entire Boscastle clan, did the accident of her own birth make her less able to be lax?
We retraced our steps along the terrace, her stick tapping. The curtains had not been drawn, and we could see the whole party in the bright drawing-room. Rosalind was listening to Lord Boscastle with an expression of pathetic, worshipping wonder.
“That young woman,” said Lady Boscastle, “is having a succès fou. Lewis, have you a penchant for extremely stupid women?”
“I am not overfond of intellectual women,” I said. “But I like them to be intelligent.”
“That is very sensible,” Lady Boscastle approved.
“By the way,” I said, “Rosalind is far from stupid.”
“Perhaps you are right,” she said indifferently. “She is a little effusive for my taste. Perhaps I am not fair.” She added, with a hint of sarcastic pleasure: “I shall be surprised if she catches your friend Roy. In spite of the bush telegraph.”
“So shall I.”
She glanced into the drawing-room. She did not need her lorgnette, her long-sighted blue eyes could see a clear tableau of Roy, Joan, and Lady Muriel: Lady Muriel had turned away, as if to hide a smile, Joan was beginning her lusty, delightful laugh, Roy was sitting solemn-faced between them.
“I shall also be surprised,” said Lady Boscastle, “if my niece Joan ever succeeds in catching him.”
“She’s very young,” I said.
“Do you think she realises that she is getting excessively fond of him?” Lady Boscastle asked. “Which is why she quarrels with him at sight. Young women with advanced ideas and strong characters often seem quite remarkably obtuse.”
“Under it all,” I said, “she’s got great capacity for love.”
I felt Lady Boscastle shrug her shoulders as we slowly made our way.
“She will never capture anyone like your friend Roy,” she said coolly. “Our dear Joan is rather – unadorned.”
She began to laugh, and turned up her face in the brilliant twilight. She looked puckish, monkey-like, satirical, enchanting.
“I am sure that her mother will never notice that Joan is getting fond of him,” said Lady Boscastle. “Muriel has never been known to notice anything of the kind in her life. It was sometimes convenient that she didn’t, my dear Lewis. Perhaps it was as well.”
In the small hours of the next morning, I was having my usual game of baccarat. I heard Rosalind’s dying fall behind me.
“I thought I should find you here. Shall I join in?”
But she did not know the rules. Sooner than explain them, it was easier for me to take her across to a roulette table.
“Don’t tell Roy that I’ve been here,” she said. “Or else I shall get into trouble.”
She gambled with the utmost method. She had decided to invest exactly ten pounds. If she made it twenty, she would stop: if she lost it, she would also stop. She sat there, looking modish, plaintive, and open-eyed: in fact, I thought, if it came to a deal she was more than a match for the violet-powdered, predatory faces round her. That night the numbers ran against her, and in half-an-hour she had lost her quota.
“That’s that,” said Rosalind. “Please can I have a drink?”
She liked money, but she threw away sums which to her were not negligible. In presents, in loans, in inventing and paying for treats, she was the most generous of women. The ten pounds had gone, and she did not give it a thought.
We sat in two of the big armchairs by the bar.
“Where’s Roy?” I asked.
“In bed, of course. And fast asleep. He sleeps like a child, bless him.”
“Always?”
“Oh, I’ve known him have a bout of insomnia. You knew that, did you? It was rather a bad one. But as a rule he just goes to sleep as soon as his head touches the pillow.” She smiled. “He’s rather a dear old thing.”
She looked with clear open eyes into mine. “Lewis,” she said, “is there any reason why I shouldn’t do?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. Does he want more from a woman than I manage to give him? He seems to like me when we’re alone–” she gave her secret, prudish, reminiscent, amorous smile. “Is there anything more he wants?”
“You ought to know.”
“I don’t know,” she said, almost ill-temperedly. “I haven’t the faintest idea. I give h
im all the chances to speak I can think of, but he never takes them. He says nice things at the proper time, of course” – again she gave a smile – “but that is neither here nor there. He never tells me his plans. I never know where I am with him. He’s frightfully elusive. Sometimes I think I don’t matter to him a scrap.”
“You do, of course.”
“Do I? Are you sure?”
“You’ve given him some peace.”
“That’s not enough,” she said sharply. “I want something to take hold of. I want to be certain I mean something to him.”
She added: “Do you think he wants to marry me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think he ought to marry me?”
I hesitated, for a fraction of time. Very quickly Rosalind cried, not plaintively but with all her force: “Why shouldn’t I make him a passable wife?”
14: One Way to Knowledge
After that talk with Rosalind, I thought again that she was living with a stranger. She knew him with her hands and lips: she knew more than most young women about men in their dressing-gowns; yet she did not know, any more than his dinner partners that January in Monte Carlo, two things about him.
First, he was sometimes removed from her, removed from any human company, by an acute and paralysing fear. It was the fear that, unless he found his rest in time, he might be overcome by melancholy again. In the moment of grace when we walked by the Serpentine, that fear was far away – and so it was during most of the joyful holiday. But once or twice, as he talked, made love, and invented mischievous jokes, he felt what to another man would have been only an hour’s sadness or fatigue. Roy was at once gripped, forced to watch his own mood.
It was like someone who has had an attack of a disease; he feels what may be a first symptom, which another would not notice or would laugh away: he cannot ignore it, he can attend to nothing else, he can only think “is it beginning again?”
