by Rebecca West
She stared at him with knitted brow.
‘For your acting?’
The idea made her laugh. ‘No.’
‘Well, what do you really want to do?’
When he put it that way she understood the whole thing. She gazed down at her plate and pouted her lips, trying to look as if she did not understand it.
‘Supposing you could change your whole life and spend the rest of it doing what you like, what would you choose to do?’
It was awful. He was keeping his eyes on her so insistently. Surely he ought to have sense enough to know what almost every woman really wanted to do. A blush was pouring over her face, her neck, her breasts; and the blood seemed to be dragging a harrow of pleasure through her flesh, so that tears of delight and agony stood in her eyes. It was awful. There was nothing more unthinkable than that one should tell a man that one wanted to have babies unless one was going to have his babies and it was almost all fixed up. And she was with Essington, she was with Essington. Yet she felt as if, were he to go on any longer, she would cry it aloud in simple words that they would never either of them be able to forget. Her gaze shifted from her plate across the table, seeking for something to talk about, to break the domination of his easy, innocent inquisitiveness. She remembered the place that had been laid just opposite her, and muttered, ‘What was it about Mr Harrop that made you so angry?’
There was a silence. She heard his heel come down smartly on the electric floor bell. ‘He has made a fool of himself. Ruined his career at the beginning.’
She knew from his gruffness that he did not like the subject but she could think of nothing else to keep him from the other. ‘How?’
‘He’s got himself engaged.’
‘Who to?’
‘A girl who works along with him in my office.’
‘A typist?’ The footman was back in the room. She had to keep this talk going. It would be too awful if Francis Pitt started off again in front of him.
‘No. Higher than that. She’s an American girl who handles a good part of my American business.’
‘Oh, not that Miss Wycherley whom I met here one day?’
‘Yes. Miss Greta Wycherley.’ He said the name ironically as if it were a romantic statement of an ugly fact.
‘But I thought you liked her! I thought you said she was clever! And she’s ever so pretty.’
‘She’s all that.’ He spoke sharply and indicated with a nod at the footman that he would give her an explanation when they were alone once more.
‘She’s quite lovely,’ said Sunflower lamely.
‘Quite lovely,’ agreed Francis Pitt, with nearly a snarl. He sat back in his chair, suddenly looking grey and tired. He nodded his head silently and impressively, with the movements of an old man, as if he were repeating to himself some judgment he had recently delivered which had been so closely based on Biblical morality that it had made him feel like a patriarch. It occurred to her that perhaps underneath everything he had old-fashioned ideas. It might be that Miss Wycherley had been silly when she was young, that she’d made a mistake as people do before they know; and that Francis Pitt thought that men oughtn’t to marry a woman who had been with anybody else. Men were so queer, you could not tell in what direction they would fail you next. She must find out about that at once …
As soon as the footman had given them the cold chicken and salad and gone out she began timidly and obstinately, ‘This Miss Wycherley—’
He shot out a forefinger towards her wrist. ‘I’ve never seen you wear that before in the daytime.’
‘What?’
‘That bracelet.’
‘Oh … I put it on because I wasn’t sure that I’d go home before the theatre.’ She had prayed that he would ask her to tea as he sometimes did. In a panic lest he should guess she had prayed for that she added, ‘I’ve got some things to do.’ Oh, now he probably wouldn’t ask her, since she had expressly said she had other things to do. Life was so difficult.
‘It’s a gorgeous thing. One of the finest I’ve ever seen. You used not to wear it when you first came here.’
‘I didn’t have it then. Essington hadn’t given it to me.’
‘When did he give it to you?’
‘Just a week or two ago.’
He was so long in speaking that she thought he had tired of the subject, and was going to try and turn him back to Miss Wycherley, when he said genially, ‘Well, you’re an exceptionally happy couple, you and Essington, Sunflower. I don’t know many women who get presents like that after ten years.’
‘I know. I was ever so pleased. It’s the first thing of the sort he’s ever given me.’
‘What do you mean? The first bracelet?’
‘No, the first jewellery. He hasn’t seemed to care for jewellery.’
‘Then what has he given you?’
She tried to remember. ‘There was a Spanish shawl, about three years ago.’
He held out his hand for the bracelet. She made haste not to keep him waiting.
‘This is a very magnificent thing, Sunflower.’
‘I know it is. It must have cost quite a lot of money.’ She spoke with a puzzled air.
‘When did you say he gave you this?’
‘About a fortnight ago.’
He turned it round and round in his little paw-hands. Something in the design seemed to be amusing him.
‘Why are you laughing?’ she asked at last.
He looked up in surprise. ‘I am not laughing.’ She saw that she had been mistaken, his face was quite grave. ‘Here, put it on again, Sunflower. Well, I suppose there’s no need for me to tell you that Essington’s very fond of you.’
‘I know he is.’ It occurred to her that this was a good opportunity to correct a view which she was sure Etta had, and which she thought it possible he shared, that Essington was always as horrid to her as he had been that night when they had all first dined together. ‘And you don’t know how specially lovely he’s been to me these last few weeks. He’s been getting nicer and nicer to me. Why, he never used to make me go away with him every weekend like he does now.’
‘And how do you spend those weekends, Sunflower? I’ve often sat here cooped up with poor Hurrell and thought of you two off in the country, and wondered what you were doing, and envied you.’
‘Oh, you needn’t, they’re nothing much,’ she said. They were, indeed, rather more than one wanted to undertake after a week’s hard work. Late on Saturday night they motored down to some country inn, and early on Sunday morning, before she had had her sleep out, she would be wakened by his discontents. He missed his bathroom, with its boiling water and its army of bottles with which he could nurse all the suspicions he was constantly conceiving about his health, about coming colds and poisoned scratches. He missed his valet. He missed the breakfast he always had at home, on the simplicity of which he would expatiate, of freshly roasted and ground coffee, with milk and an egg just sent down from the farm, and the best peach from the greenhouse. When they went out for a walk he missed the seat on the terrace where one read all the Sunday papers, and hated the mob of staring people who infested this open country as they never did his park. She had to soothe him perpetually but never dared to say the only words that were really apposite. ‘Essington, you are too old for this sort of thing. You don’t want to be romantic at your time of life, and I never did. We both want to be comfortable. Let’s get married so that we can have a nice place together and stay quiet.’ After lunch, which infuriated him by the contrast with the kind of meal he would have got in his own home, he would go upstairs and lie down on his bed. She would have to go too. It worried him if she went out for a walk by herself; and also he needed her to open and shut the window, to lower and raise the blind. She would sit in an armchair, drowsing, listening to all the sounds of the automobiles and charabancs and motor-cycles as they carried the free people along the road outside, seeing Francis Pitt against the darkness of her lowered lids. Then there would come a querulous voice from the bed
, ‘Sunflower, what are you thinking of?’ And she would start, and throw the thought of Francis Pitt away from her, and stutter, ‘I was thinking … of that scene with the wineglass in the second act. I don’t feel I’ve got it right yet’, or, ‘I was thinking … of that article in The Times yesterday by the explorer about the tombs he found in that cave in South America. He found one girl in her coffin dressed like a bride. I wonder what had happened to her, whether she had just been married, or whether she was just going to be …’ He would give a little grunt. She would hear the creak of the bed as he turned over on his other side. There would be some time of silence, and then again a querulous voice, ‘Come and put your arms round me, Sunflower …’
Perhaps she ought not to have said, ‘They’re nothing much.’ It was a giveaway of Essington. But Francis Pitt had said he envied them, and it might be that his imprisonment in that bleak bedroom with the dying man had seemed worse when he had imagined Essington and her having a lovely time in the country, and she couldn’t bear by even so little to darken any further the life that, because of his sensitiveness and his inordinate, unfashionable capacity for love, must be dark enough just now. To put matters right for Essington she went on, ‘No, they’re nothing much. It’s my fault. I’m tired before I start, you see. But Essington’s lovely to me.’ An incident which had greatly moved her when it happened came into her mind, and she turned to him with shining eyes, immensely relieved to find that she could back her defence of Essington with a true story. ‘Why, the other day he did the most wonderful thing—!’ She checked herself and said primly, ‘But it’s very private.’
‘Count me as big brother who never tells,’ said Francis Pitt easily; and when she hesitated, and inclined towards thinking that it would not be right to repeat that story, he added gravely, ‘and who is very glad to listen. My own life has not gone too well in these matters. I will tell you the whole long tale of it some day. But it does me good to hear from your life of an affection that seems to go on being warm and passionate and romantic after so many years.’ She still kept a doubtful silence; and he went on, ‘Or so it seems to me. I hear on every side that Essington is an irritable, unloving man. But I think you could tell me differently.’
‘Oh, I can, I can!’ she exclaimed indignantly. ‘The nerve they have to say such things! Listen to this! I thought it was too private to tell you—but if you know it you’ll be able to stick up for him. The other weekend we went to Virginia Water. Do you know Virginia Water?’
‘No, Sunflower.’
‘Well, it seems a funny place to go for a weekend. It’s quite near London. Lots of motor-buses go there. But it’s lovely. It’s one of the loveliest spots in the world. I always hope dying’ll be like what it is. You see, there’s a pub on the highroad, and you stop there. And it’s all dusty and noisy, with the motor-buses starting and people getting out of charabancs and kids crying. And you go inside the pub and that’s noisy with people having drinks and all. And then you go out into the garden, and there’s lots of parties having tea and waiters running about between the tables. And you go into a shrubbery, just a common sort of shrubbery, and through a wicket gate, and up among some trees that aren’t specially nice, and then all of a sudden you come out on a lake. A great big lake. Oh, miles round. With trees on the edge, reflected in the water like a face in a glass. And it’s calm, ever so calm, like those Chinese paintings in the British Museum. That’s why I say I hope it’s like dying. You feel you’ve got home at last after all the dust and bother. You see there’s something unlike other lakes about it. It lies differently, somehow. That’s because it isn’t natural. The Prince Regent made it. Dug up a lot of earth and ran water in from miles away. And pinched a lot of columns and things out of the courtyard of the British Museum and stuck them by the side of the lake, just how he thought they’d look pretty. And they don’t look quite natural either, for the way they’re put together they couldn’t really have ever been. So that too makes it look like some other world. Oh, haven’t you ever been? We must go, we must go!’
He said softly, ‘Yes, we must go.’
A vision of another loveliness diverted her for an instant. She stared at it, her mouth a little open, smiling, and looking very young. And there’s another place. In France. A place I went to. I want to take you there, too.’
He said again, as softly, ‘Yes, we must go.’
‘Well, I was forgetting. We went down there the Sunday before last. And in the evening, before dinner, we were taking a walk by the lake. Lovely it was. Just like a mirror, and a swan drawing lines over it. Well, there was a poor old man in among some trees right away from the water, gathering sticks. You know the sort of old man I mean, goes about the country catching moles and things, nothing regular. Well, usually Essington doesn’t take any notice of that kind of person. He isn’t interested in just people, you know. He’s tired of them. But this time he left where we were walking and went straight over to this poor old man. At first I didn’t notice what he was doing because I … was thinking of something else. But all of a sudden I found ourselves standing by this poor old man and Essington takes out a pound note and gives it to the old man. You could have knocked me down with a feather. You see, Essington doesn’t ever give to beggars and that in the street, not ever. It isn’t that he’s mean, for he’s most generous, but he doesn’t hold with it. So I said to him when we got away, ‘Whatever did you do that for, all of a sudden?’ And he said, ‘It was a thank-offering, Sunflower. A thank-offering because you’re down here with me today after ten years. And a bribe to heaven to let me always have you with me, for I should die if I lost you.’ She hesitated, wondering if she should tell him that there had been tears in Essington’s eyes as he spoke. But that was too private. So she ended, ‘Now wasn’t that a lovely thing to do?’
Francis Pitt dropped a lump of ice in his glass with his pudgy fingers and took a long drink before he answered. ‘That is a very beautiful story, Sunflower. Thank you for telling me that. It has made me feel … much better.’
She had known he would appreciate it. ‘Wasn’t it lovely?’ she asked delightedly. ‘And he’s always doing things like that just now. I’m glad I told you, because you do understand, just as I knew you would. And in a way, you know, you’re responsible for it all.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Well, it’s only since he’s been coming up here that he’s been like this.’
He started bolt upright in his chair and turned on her a face blank with astonishment, though not with incredulity. It was not as if she was telling him something that he did not know, but rather as if she were disclosing to him her knowledge of something with which he had long been familiar but which he had thought to be hidden from her. He laughed deprecatingly, and tilted his face down, smiling up at her puckishly. But when she smiled back amiably and uncomprehendingly he again started and seemed confused. ‘Well, how do you account for that?’
She wagged her head to give impressiveness to her words. ‘Believe me or not, I think it’s Mr Hurrell!’
‘Mr Hurrell?’
‘Yes. I think meeting Mr Hurrell after all those years, and in those circumstances, turned him all inside out, and made him feel more like when he was young, before he got fussed-up and upset about things.’
‘Oh, I see what you mean!’ exclaimed Francis Pitt. ‘Yes, yes, yes. I agree with you entirely. It must be Hurrell. And indeed I should think he would be bound to have just that effect on someone who was being reconciled to him after many years. He would bring him back to all the best that had ever been in him. His own goodness is such a real and powerful thing that it would be bound to be infectious.’
He spoke quickly, almost mechanically, and she heard his heel go down on the floor-bell. Of course he loved the dying man too well to want to speak of him. She should have had more sense.
But when the footman had left the room she realised that he was in tremendously high spirits. He rubbed his hands and said, ‘Ah, Sunflower, look what we’ve g
ot to eat.’
‘Raspberry tart,’ she said. There didn’t seem anything extraordinary about it.
‘Yes, raspberries, and not strawberry.’
‘Mm.’ You couldn’t help laughing when he looked at you like that, his grin stretching right across his face, mischief quivering across his face like sunshine on the face of a gargoyle.
‘Raspberry, not strawberries.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’ He was leaning right over the corner of the table, his face was close to hers, their laughing mouths were near each other. She wanted to throw her head back and giggle as if he were tickling her.
‘You don’t remember?’
‘No! No! No!’
‘Raspberry, not strawberry?’
‘No. I tell you I don’t know what you mean!’
‘Don’t you remember telling me that first night you came here and we walked in my chestnut alley?’
She leaned back sharply in her chair. There came over her like sickness a hideous feeling that he would have liked to jump out of his chair and thrust her backwards and put his face against her neck and munch the flesh with wallowing, insulting kisses. But why did she think such awful things about him every now and then? Was it that she had been so greatly disappointed in Essington that a part of her which was tired out with pain kept begging her not to invite such pain again by hoping too much of Francis Pitt? It must be that. For the whole thing was a delusion, there was nothing in his face when one looked into it except the most innocent gaiety, such a will to be happy that he was laughing heartily at something that was not really funny, that was just nice.
‘Fancy you remembering that.’
‘Dear Sunflower, I remember everything you say. Everything. You have style, dear little Sunflower. You have always had it as a woman. Now you are beginning to have it as an actress. And when one has style everything one does has a meaning, everything one does fits into a picture. Sometimes when I cannot sleep or when I have to sit beside Hurrell, I think of all sorts of little things I’ve heard you say and little things I’ve watched you do, and they all fit into a picture. And it is a picture that does me good to think of. So I have said over to myself more than once, dear Sunflower, all the pretty things you said to me when we were walking in my chestnut alley.’ She smiled at the naïve, childish vanity of possession that made him always say ‘my’ instead of ‘the’ when he spoke of anything he owned, and make a slight pompous movement of the hands. Yet he would give away anything. He was funny, he was lovely.
