Sunflower

by Rebecca West

  Suddenly it seemed to her as if from all the windows of the three storeys, within their frames of heavy grey moulding, there looked that darkness, radiant yet black, like the eyes of blind men, which shines out of empty houses. She plucked at Essington’s coat-sleeve and said, under her breath, ‘Oh, Ess, I wish we hadn’t come.’

  He suggested eagerly, ‘Well, if you stagger and faint, my dear, I don’t see what I can do but take you home.’

  She hesitated. ‘But you want to meet Hurrell.’

  ‘I think, Sunflower, that tonight I’d rather take you home than see Hurrell.’ He spoke significantly, deferentially, humbly; as if there were a hidden meaning in his words, a meaning dependent on the enormous value which he set on her, and as if he dare not explain it save at her express request, since he was conscious he had done things which would justify her in forbidding him to speak any more of his love for her. His eyes were blinking.

  Touched and puzzled, because she could see no reason for such a rush of emotion at this particular moment, she would have said, ‘Why, what is it, lovie?’ but just then her eye, roving over the house as over some sleeping enemy out of whose presence she was tiptoeing, caught sight of the butler standing by the open door at the top of the stone staircase, and perceived that something here was odd. His face wore a faintly appalled expression, which he was not attempting to conceal under the solemnity of his official bearing, but which he was actually presenting to the arriving visitors as if, for the time being, it were part of his official bearing. She glanced quickly at the footman who was standing beside him and saw on his face a younger version of the same expression: he looked strained and sullen, as if the sky of his youth would have been clear enough if other people had not exercised an unfair privilege and shadowed it with the clouds of their misfortunes. She exclaimed, ‘Ess, I believe there’s some trouble in this house. Let’s go and see if we can do anything!’ and started up the steps. Essington, left behind, uttered a faint wheeze of expostulation. She felt his reluctance like a noose cast round her, dragging her back, but she squared her shoulders and went on, for she felt she must have her way in this; and at the door she found him panting level with her.

  The butler told them portentously, ‘Mr Pitt and Miss Pitt are detained with Sir Robert Cornelliss, but they will not be long,’ and stooped forward, as if to expand this statement with some further courtesy, some further ominousness, when his mouth fell open and he looked over his shoulder with an expression Sunflower identified as that which crosses the face of an actor when he sees a cat strolling in the wings during his big silent scene and is not sure whether the audience sees it or not. He seemed to be hearing some sound that they did not. Slowly, looking before them as if they were royalty but not doing it with ease, he led them into the amber shadows of a hall which was so impersonally furnished with large leather armchairs and sofas and the heads and skins of big game, that it might have been part of a club. After a certain point he seemed disconcerted that they were following him, and coming to a halt in front of an armchair in the middle of the room, he made exasperated gestures at the footman, who was standing in the doorway absorbedly watching his progress as one might watch a sportsman performing a difficult technical feat. Suddenly the footman understood what was expected of him, started forward jerkily and took their things, and began to head them off towards a door in the wall opposite to that towards which the butler had been leading them. Essington, who, when people behaved inexplicably always fancied that they were behaving insolently, gave a click of annoyance; and when, just as the footman opened the door, they heard a loud grunt which apparently proceeded from the butler, he spun round and glared at the man, who endured his gaze, but swallowed hard.

  Sunflower giggled outright. And that the butler could not bear. He stepped aside and disclosed, lying asleep in the armchair he was shielding, a very tall man. His handsome, oblong face was blotched and scarlet; his large, oblong limbs were flung out in the stark yet loose abandonment of drunkenness. As they looked at him he belched.

  Sunflower whispered, ‘Ugh! Who can he be?’

  Essington could not answer for a minute, so violently was he trembling, ‘That is my successor in office, Lord Canterton.’

  The four stood in silence for a minute, looking down on the drunkard, feeling drawn together by a community of decent feeling.

  Essington murmured passionately, ‘When he was lord chancellor I have seen him so on the woolsack … The … the shame of it.’

  She slipped her hand into his. ‘Never mind, dear, never mind. You’re well out of politics if this sort is getting in. You mustn’t get so worked up … dear …’ But she realised that she must move him on, for the situation was becoming horrid because the other two men were servants. The butler was looking as if he could have explained to them the presence of the drunkard in a way that would lift the suspicion of disorder from this house whose honour was his own, but could not because they were his master’s guests and he knew his place; his Scotch, sentimental face was waterlogged with self-pity and enjoyment of the martyrdom of his solid worth and natural dignity at the hands of social convention. ‘He isn’t half,’ she thought acidly, ‘enjoying himself.’ And the footman was smiling wetly and meanly, as if it amused him to see his betters shamed by one of their own kind. She wanted to cry out to him, ‘You and me are the same class, so I’ve a right to talk to you! You shouldn’t take their money if you feel like that about them!’ Rage flared in her at the look of his great healthy body with its broad shoulders and thick thighs, his handsome face, with its sound flesh and lips full of blood. Things had come to a pretty pass when strong men like this were content to put on funny clothes and wait on men they could have knocked down with a single drive of the fist and make it worse by sniggering at them behind their backs. Oddly she found herself thinking of her chauffeur Harrowby and including him in her anger, though he was nice as nice could be and never would laugh at anybody. In the background of her rage she saw the lights of Chiswick High Street and the Saturday night crowds ruddy-faced under the naphtha flares, and there was anguish in her vision of it. Some understanding about life she had found in those early days when she went with her mother and father among these crowds, which consisted of nothing but mothers and fathers and children, had been violated. She was none the better for her journey from those parts. At the end had been deception, abandonment. Irrational fury made her tremble as Essington was trembling. Ah, the poor dear! He would need a lot of quieting down, for Parliament was his church, a public man a priest to him. She said, ‘Take me away, that man makes me sick,’ and shepherded him through the door.

  It was a pity that there were a man and a woman waiting in the library but they did not look as if they would intrude, for they belonged to the smart and jaunty type whom Essington loathed and who usually loathed Essington at sight. The man, who, standing by the vast circular mahogany table in the middle of the room, was pouring himself a drink from a curiously large cocktail shaker, looked at them over his shoulder with brilliant grey eyes that flickered like the tongue of an asp, and then turned away his head. The woman, who was bright with the marmalade tints of the weatherbeaten blonde, was sitting back in a leather armchair by a distant window, her eyes shut, though she held a glass on her knee; her small green felt hat was lying on the floor between her feet. Sunflower wondered who they were; they had the look of being News. She did not like the way they seemed to be at home in Francis Pitt’s house. They were in day-clothes, so it did not seem likely that they were stopping to dinner. She was glad of that. It really was a nuisance, these people being there, for there were all sorts of odd things in the room that might have taken Essington’s mind off Canterton. The same hand that had overdressed the ruined wall outside with saxifrages had filled the room with an astonishing excess of flowers. There were a dozen bowls of red and white roses on the big central table and on the massive writing-desk, and on the three or four funny little round tables with tops of inlaid coloured marble were vases filled a
little too full with crucifixion lilies; and at the four corners of the bookshelves, which wove a hideous pattern round the room out of the solid blocks of harsh colours and grainy textures made by poorly bound complete sets, stood brass jars from which grew flaming azaleas. ‘It’s as if a railway waiting-room had gone gay,’ she thought, feeling cold, because she had to admit that there was something deeply wrong about the room. Like the house itself, it cast discredit on everybody who had anything to do with it, but more heavily on the man who lived there now than on the man who built it. This man lived in a better age, he had the money to live anywhere, he liked flowers. How could he bear this room? That perversity, that preference for the unpleasant rather than the pleasant …

  She must say something to Essington, who was still trembling. ‘Isn’t it awful?’ she murmured. ‘Furnished in the year one, I should say. And the pictures—!’ She rested her hands on the hideous brawn-like marble of the mantelpiece, which was almost entirely covered from end to end with vases of the scarlet-spotted lilies, and looked up at the picture hanging above it. It was a Victorian historical tableau, representing one young woman in Saxon costume handing a crucifix to another similarly clad. Hopefully she asked, for he liked making jokes about that sort of thing, ‘What’s that supposed to be?’

  ‘Oh, that’s St Walburga giving the rood to St Editha.’

  ‘What’s she doing that for?’

  He gazed at her severely. ‘That’s a rude question,’ he said with an air of rebuke.

  She tittered delightedly. ‘Oh, you are …’ He would be better in no time.

  The footman came to them with cocktails. As they turned to refuse they found that the man who had been drinking at the table had come up behind them, and was standing there holding out his hand. He was a hard and glittering creature, with his steely eyes bright among wrinkles that were there not because he was old but because his expression was contracted on too tight a spring, his nutcracker chin, hard and smooth as a metal-casting, his hair that was turning aluminium at the temple, his sporting suit that was the colour of an armoured car. At the sight of his smile they knew only the modified reassurance of those who come on a dangerous animal in one of its rare genial moods. Essington made no move towards taking his hand, so he raised the glass he was holding in his other with a hail-alligator-well-met expression, and said, ‘Ah, you don’t know me, Lord Essington, but I feel I know you. I’m Sir John Murphy. Jack Murphy to my friends, I hope, to you.’

  He bowed extravagantly from the hips. ‘He talks Irish like we used to on the stage before the Irish players came,’ thought Sunflower. ‘I often think it was a pity they came. It was easier and what did it matter.’

  He continued with pomp. ‘I feel warm things towards you, Lord Essington, for honour came to me at your hands. I received my baronetcy from the government of which you were a member.’

  ‘No, you didn’t.’ Essington’s voice had gone thin and high and polite, as it always did when he was going to be really rude.

  ‘Ah, but I did.’ He slapped his chest. ‘I’m Sir John Murphy, Jack Murphy to my friends. And your government gave me my baronetcy.’

  Essington said, ‘No.’

  ‘Ah, but yes. You great men grow forgetful, you have so many—’

  ‘Didn’t you say you were Sir John Murphy?’

  ‘That’s who I—’

  ‘Of the firm of Murphy & Brace in the City?’

  ‘Yes, that’s—’

  Essington gently shook his head. His voice had become a mild squeak. ‘Then you certainly didn’t get a baronetcy from any government of which I was a member.’ He wheeled about and faced the mantelpiece.

  ‘Ah, sure, you may be right!’ cried Sir John Murphy to his back, with undiminished cordiality. ‘Indeed, I know you’re right! You went out in the spring, and I got my baronetcy in the autumn! What a memory you’ve got!’ He threw back his head unnecessarily far, drained his glass, and exclaimed apparently without irony, ‘Now, I’ll always be flattered that although the men you’ve known who’ve got titles in the last few years must run into thousands, I might say millions, considering your great position, you remembered when I got my baronetcy.’ He pressed between Essington and Sunflower and tried to find a place for his empty glass between the vases on the mantelpiece, muttering contemptuously, ‘Flowers, flowers, Pitt is mad on flowers.’ It occurred to Sunflower that he spoke as if he did not like Francis Pitt. They could not be close friends, then. She was glad.

  Having found a place for his glass he started work on her. He flashed his eyes at her and raised the corners of his mouth in an expression of lustfulness, that was evidently, from a certain mechanical quality about it, part of the etiquette he always observed when meeting a lady. ‘And for different reasons I feel as if I knew this charming friend of yours here!’ He did not seem abashed when the introduction he waited for did not come. She gazed at him in amazement and perceived suddenly that he was drunk. The curious, flickering, restless impression he gave was due to a constant succession of fine muscular adjustments he was making to compensate for the waves of unsteadiness that passed over him; all the time he was shifting his weight from one foot to another, or laying a finger ever so lightly on the mantelpiece, or resting his knee against an armchair. With his slim, jockeyish body he was riding his intoxication as if it were a horse. She thought that perhaps his condition was the cause of his indifference to rebuff; but also it seemed to her that there was an adamantine core to him, which would never get drunk no matter how sodden the rest of him might be, which was inaccessible to ordinary notions of honour and dignity as it was to drunkenness, which might not improbably decide after experiment that the most disarming way to take an insult was buffoonery. She felt a flash of pride in Essington. She wished she could get away from this horrid man, but he was standing right in front of her, thrusting out his nutcracker chin under one of his too tightly sprung smiles, and speaking unctuously into her face. ‘I’ve no hesitation in telling you to your face that I’m right pleased to meet the woman who’s known as the most beautiful woman in the world, for I don’t expect that a true woman, and I can see that you are a true woman, will be ashamed of being known that way. ‘Tis not human to be ashamed of your distinction. I’ll not conceal from you that I’m proud of mine. It’s the fashion to laugh at titles nowadays, but I’m proud of mine. Yes, I’m proud of my baronetcy. And, dear lady, will you tell me that I have no right to be? I’m one of the only two baronets in whose patent of nobility it is written that the honour was conferred because of “exceptional services”—“exceptional services”, mark you, “rendered to England in time of war.” What man’s going to be ashamed of that, I ask you, dear lady? Proud I was to serve my country, though I’m Irish. Old Irish, we are, though for a generation or two the family has been settled in Liverpool. Twelve of us there were,’ he said, beaming at her with a face suddenly grown soft in contemplation of the domestic virtues, ‘and all double-jointed.’

  He lifted up his hands, which had more character than most hands, since they were exquisitely shaped, dark brown with sunburn, grained and horny like shagreen, and adorned, even over-dressed, with gleaming rose-pink nails; and, awed by his inconsequence as one is bound to be by any quality when carried to an infinite degree, they watched him while he bent back each finger with a loud crack. Fortunately he lost interest at the middle finger of his second hand, and basked again in the sun of sentiment. ‘Yes, twelve of us there were, and I’ve given all of them that grew up, for I lost a dear little sister, sweet little Bridget, when she was twelve years old, God rest the little angel, I was saying I’d given all the others enough to rub along on, yes, enough to rub along on. I’ve not been forgetful. Only the week before last I gave my dear old mother one of the largest hotels in Paris. Nobody can say I haven’t been a good son to my old mother, ever since I struck it lucky in California.’ He turned about and faced Essington, putting on the unnatural ecstasy of a man in an advertisement. ‘There’s where I met our good friend Franci
s. Ah, he’s a fine fellow, our Francis! I can tell you that. We had our rough times together when we were finding our feet out there, and I saw the worst and the best of him, and let me tell you the worst of him is better than the most of us, and the best is something that brings tears to my eyes. And, by God, he is loyal to his friends.’ Shaking his head tenderly, he lifted his glass from the mantelpiece, found that a drop had collected in the bottom of it, gulped it, and remarked absently, ‘Yes, I’ve always been a good son to my old mother.’ His eyes roved towards Sunflower, his face, which seemed beginning to fall to pieces, pulled itself up into that polite and mechanical look of lustfulness, and he said to Essington in a flattering manner, ‘Ah, I’m like you. I like a woman who looks like a woman …’