They discussed this. Finola was trying, as her father had suggested, to find suitable friends for Jenny, who had met no one with her parents in the North Riding. The Parnells knew few people in their early twenties, children of couples older than themselves, and Finola could not think of any young man who would make an interesting husband.
When they had settled the question, Finola did not go. She looked at Gerard’s knees, and then at the bookshelves, and then back, and opened her mouth.
‘Is something wrong, Finola?’
‘I’ve got to – I don’t know, it’s so difficult – it’s that –’ She did not sob, but tears began to leak steadily out of her eyes, lots of tears which surprised her, and were something like a comfort.
He gave her his handkerchief, and waited. ‘You must tell me, if there is something wrong.’
‘I d-don’t –’ She put her hands in her lap. ‘It’s too stupid to cry. Gerard, I – I want you to sleep in your dressing-room. At least for a while.’
‘Why?’ he said, moving further away and tucking one hand inside his coat.
‘I can’t stand you being so cold all the time!’
There was another pause, and she did not cry though her face was sticky.
‘I don’t think that your asking me to move into my dressing-room goes very well with a complaint about my coldness,’ he said, smiling slightly and recrossing his legs.
‘Oh, haven’t you got any imagination!’ she said, watching this.
‘I’ve always suspected I must have very little.’ He had always compared himself with Darcy; and Finola had always thought he had a great deal, like Anatole.
She struggled to say the words she had practised: ‘You have no heart any more. Your heart isn’t in it.’ Her eyes began to water. ‘And it’s too often, Gerard. It’s just too often.’ Every third night or so, occasionally twice in one night. ‘It’s exhausting. I don’t like it!’
‘Nonsense,’ he said icily, blushing. ‘What absolute rubbish, Finola!’
‘Women are different, you don’t understand! I didn’t think you could d-do things –’
‘Do what? No, don’t try to tell me! Have I ever failed to consider you? Have I ever not realised that women are different as you call it? You said once –’ He thought he was very like a woman, and though he had silently regretted this in men’s company, he had always resented the female view that men were without feelings, and considered love and marriage a nuisance: even Christian men.
When Finola looked up, she could see that his thoughts were turning sadly to fate and irony and religion. She did not mind his reading The Imitation of Christ every night before he went to bed. She wanted to tell him that she loved him, in a way which was quite improper and unnatural after eight years of marriage.
‘You do neglect me. You do. Since Constance – because you disapprove of what I did I mean, and you won’t forgive me, and you didn’t even tell me not to, and after all you have gained –’ He would say it was wrong to love him, if she told him she did. Her crying began almost to be noisy.
Gerard interrupted. ‘Finola, none of this makes sense! You seem to have absolutely no logic.’
‘It’s not logical. It’s not a question of logic.’ She realised that she was on the point of saying she wanted another baby.
Gerard got up from the sofa and went to stand in front of his desk. ‘You’re saying that I seem to have less – affection for you than I had before?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s not true.’ She said nothing. ‘I tell you it is not true!’
‘Don’t, Gerard, I don’t want to – oh, please don’t use my bedroom any more!’
‘Stop crying,’ he said, speaking more harshly than he had ever spoken to her before. ‘Stop it.’
‘I won’t stop if I don’t want to!’ said Finola.
‘It is not true that I have not forgiven you for what you did to my mother,’ he continued, working his right fist into his left-hand palm. ‘Do you understand? You were very wrong, you know you were, but it’s done now –’
‘Oh, be quiet!’
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I shan’t come to your bedroom, if that is what will satisfy you. And I hope you’ll come to regret it.’ He waited. ‘Please go now, Finola.’
‘Yes, I’ll go. I’ll go, as you say.’ She was still wet with tears, and Gerard walked towards her as she raised herself from the sofa. He put his hands on her shoulders.
‘Do compose yourself, at least until you’re in your own room. Do you want Mainwaring to see you?’
‘I’m all right! Let me go.’
Gerard dropped his hands, but remained looking down at her. ‘I suppose I can’t hold this against you,’ he said, turning aside at last, and rubbing his forehead. ‘I know I must not.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ said Finola, who could still feel the grip of his fingers. She left him, and he looked furiously after her, but she did not see.
Gerard realised after a moment that the room was silent, and she had closed the door, and he could not go after her like a young and passionate man. He made his way back to his desk and tried to collect his thoughts; and while he stared at a letter from the Inland Revenue, his legs began to tremble.
He came close to tears as he wondered how he was to manage, alone in his dressing-room bed, and he blamed himself for self-indulgence as he looked back on his unmarried years. Before he met Finola, he had wished at times that he were like Darcy, whom he loved in spite of his being so immoral; but he had known he could never compete, although he was so much more lovely to look at.
Gerard had had a love affair with a married woman of thirty-eight when he was not quite twenty, and then he had become a practising Christian. He had left his mistress, and in the next ten years he had visited a brothel three times. He closed his eyes as he thought of all he had done, and of how kind and jolly and pleased the three girls had pretended to be.
When he was thirty-one he had fallen in love with Marjorie Pelham-Colville, who had agreed to marry him and had persuaded him to sleep with her while they were engaged; but she had jilted him for another man a month before the wedding. Women were still said to find him too polite, too old-fashioned, and too amusingly virtuous. They were like Darcy. Gerard had been almost wholly chaste between his being jilted and his marriage to Finola, and he thought that his chastity had been without virtue, because it had not made him happy. He had not known what else to do, when he had loved nobody, and had wished himself in love without success.
He thought Finola very ungrateful for having been the only woman in the world on whom he had pressed his attentions in the past nine years, and he reminded himself that she must be far more ignorant than he was himself of what marriage was truly like. Glancing for a moment out of the window, Gerard suddenly picked up a glass paperweight and threw it at the painting of the battle of Malplaquet.
It gave a hollow bounce which stunned him, fell, and smashed on the floor. When he had recovered from the shock, Gerard was surprised by how much bolder and more sensible the action made him feel. He had only read in books of people throwing things in a temper. ‘Damn it,’ he murmured, smiling uneasily. ‘Damn it, bloody fool you are.’
He forgot for a while that he would have to be chaste for the rest of his life, and he prayed not to be angry unjustly, and also not to show any just rage. When the thought of his future came back to him, he prayed for the courage to admit to Finola that in part she was right. He could not wholly love a woman who encouraged him to hate his mother, and had so little respect for his judgement that she would disregard his wishes.
Gerard began to cry, though he was only thinking now of the married woman who had seduced him thirty years ago and made him adore her, then had gradually disgusted him and made him fear her. She had been a most influential hostess, and she was still alive.
*
The next day, there was a dance at a house near Wimborne Minster. Dinner had to be eaten rather early, in full dress though they we
re alone, and then there was a long cold drive. Finola and Gerard might have declined the invitation if Jenny Mackenzie had not been staying with them, and Jenny knew this well.
After dinner, Finola did not bother to go upstairs to make sure her face and her dress would do, but Gerard disappeared for a while and Jenny went to her room to stare at herself. Finola went into Constance’s sitting-room, did a little tapestry, and thought about dancing with Gerard. She imagined her niece’s looking on with sad hero-worship in her eyes. Last night she had thought for the first time that she would be really rather old to have another baby. She was thirty-six, though she looked younger, and Jenny made her feel aged, a worldly and a horrible person. Finola could not love her clumsy, grateful half-niece, known to all the family as ‘Little Jenny’. The girl had been named for Liza’s brilliant sister, who had died in Barcelona in 1938.
Jenny came into the sitting-room, blinking without her usual thick spectacles. She smiled at Finola and said: ‘Is my dress really all right, Aunt Finola?’
‘Yes of course, darling! Try not to call me aunt, Jenny, it’s so ageing.’
‘I’m so sorry, it must be, it’s just a habit. I mustn’t, I know!’ Jenny smiled and gazed at her, and allowed her eyes to fall.
She sat down, and her enormous skirt rose above her knees. She pushed it down, and stared at the high pointed heels of her shoes which Finola, who had bought all the clothes for her in London, was sure would catch in the hem of the net petticoat she wore. Jenny was eighteen and very shy, but sometimes she concealed her shyness by trying to flirt shockingly, or to be intellectual, and Finola hoped that she would do neither tonight. Jenny had had no formal education apart from a term spent at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, where she said she had nearly died of misery.
Finola, who had never been especially fond of her vague half-sister Liza, was very cross at the way she and her husband had neglected to prepare Jenny for ordinary life, by keeping her shut up in their draughty Victorian castle, and then trying to send her to a school which sounded like a prison. It was all very much worse than her own upbringing. Finola thought of some tart remarks to make to Liza, rejected them because Liza would tell Jenny and Jenny would cry, and said: ‘You know, when I was a girl, clothes were so much more sensible, at least for the young.’ She remembered Miranda Pagett binding down her bosoms in 1926 or so, but continued: ‘Those petticoats must be awful, and as for some of the underwear one can get nowadays, it’s positively Victorian, plastic bones and all that. Don’t you think so?’
Finola herself was wearing a dark blue and silver dress, which was sufficiently fashionable, but the skirt was unsupported and her shoulders had straps. She washed her light, bobbed hair herself, because Gerard had once been rather pleased to have a wife who did not spend hours weekly in the hairdresser’s. Her shoes were low-heeled, and as she looked at her niece, who might one day be quite pretty, she thought they were rather too like Alice’s.
‘I suppose so,’ said Jenny. ‘Did you have an Eton crop, Finola?’
‘No, not quite that, but I did have a shingle, when I was about twelve.’
Gerard came in, holding his watch, and Finola thought he looked unsuitably noble, in his black and white, for a middle-aged man at a quiet little dance in the country.
‘Is everything ready?’ he said. ‘I think we ought to set off.’
Finola walked out of the sitting-room first, then Jenny, then Gerard. They put on their heaviest coats and left the house, and the women’s ankles froze as they clattered over the flagstones of the dark garden, to the gate where the car was waiting. They sat in silence, feeling rather tired and suddenly full of dinner, as Gerard started the motor and turned it cautiously into the road.
Finola sat at the back of the car, looking ahead at the pale shade of the headlights and the jerking shapes of trees, her nostrils aware of petrol and dog-hairs and Jenny’s new scent, and Gerard’s shaving-cream, and the other thing which made up the warm male smell. Her eyes began to water for the first time since yesterday afternoon. Alone last night she had concluded that it was the lack of emotional restraint, the shallow hastiness which she saw in so many people, that puzzled and displeased her. She had at last shown the same qualities herself, and could not be forgiven, not when quietness had won her so much in the end, before. Gerard, in his dressing-room, had had much the same thoughts about himself and his desires.
CHAPTER 12
THE FIFTH OF NOVEMBER
It was a great pity, Finola thought, that Winston Lowell should be coming to stay just when she and Gerard were at odds; but she had made a grim and satisfying plan to marry him to Jenny, and so in her way she looked forward to his arrival. She thought that Jenny, who was close to being in love with Gerard and blushed whenever he spoke to her, would be much improved by a sensible, dominant, elderly husband.
Gerard had suggested a marriage between them to amuse Finola, when Jenny first came to stay at the end of October. He had said: ‘After all, when she loses her self-consciousness, she has something – something of your own charm, actually. I expect Lowell would like her, why not?’
Winston arrived at Combe Chalcot in time for lunch on the fifth of November, and his appearance gave Finola a slight shock. She had forgotten, when thinking about him and Jenny, that although he was so plain and dark, he gave an impression of coarse sex, which she found slightly repellent but which other women might not. For the first time she used the words ‘coarse sex’, and made herself blush. Katie Van Leyden, with whom they were to dine the next day, would be bound to flirt with him, and perhaps Jenny would do so too.
Just after Winston arrived, Jenny came downstairs to join them in Constance’s sitting-room. She was looking her best, and she seemed, Finola thought at lunch, to think him a safe man whom she did not need to impress. It would do very well: she was a good sweet girl and a baronet’s daughter, and she would have about five thousand pounds one day which would be useful to him. Winston had no money of his own (Gerard had told Finola that this was because his father had worked in the Rolls-Royce factory in Derby) and he had gone up to King’s on a county scholarship. Winston had mentioned this one afternoon, chatting with Gerard in the London Library, and he had found Gerard’s polite interest, and faint guilt, quite satisfactory.
Finola remembered, listening to Winston at lunch, that Gerard had been much moved by his brief story, though he had remarked that Lowell seemed to be a happy man. She thought that Gerard could not possibly understand the mind of the social climber, especially one who displayed such casual success. She wondered if Winston was considered by his family to be a traitor to his class, and she thought she would question him with delicate interest later.
At lunch they ate cottage pie and bottled-cherry crumble, which Finola thought a modest meal and her cook thought disgusting. They talked about politics, which was considered almost a neutral topic by the Parnells, a cause of gentle and sometimes interesting difference of opinion. It was not something about which very fortunate people had a right to hold serious views, in public and without apology. In Hugh’s time, the position at Combe Chalcot had been quite different: he had enjoyed a fine, red-faced political argument.
‘What do you think?’ said Winston, turning to Jenny with a look of sincere interest. He had excellent manners.
‘Oh dear, I haven’t been following,’ she said, sitting up straight. ‘Who – who exactly is Dr Summerskill? I suppose I’m very stupid,’ she hurried on, ‘but my parents never have newspapers, you see, so I haven’t got into the habit of reading them. And I never know.’ Finola thought that Jenny sounded charmingly unaffected at last, and was glad that she herself had not been asked for her view. She had opinions, but she tended nowadays to think they sounded stupid when she voiced them. Her being noted for quiet good sense and feminine reason made it all the more difficult, she thought as she signalled to Carlotta. She wondered why conversation was always a little slow and awkward, when even close friends first entered the house.
‘I’m afraid there isn’t much to do down here,’ said Gerard with a slight smile, when they had finished their coffee. ‘I’m rather busy this afternoon, but –’
‘There are lots of walks,’ said Finola, ‘if you’d like that?’
‘I should, very much,’ said Winston. ‘You must take me round.’
‘Jenny, darling, would you like to come with us?’ said Finola, turning.
‘No, thank you, Finola, I went out for a walk this morning.’
‘Oh.’ She thought briskly that she would take him through the back of the walled garden, over the hillock behind, through Sarey’s Copse and down to the village, and in a moment she envisaged every view they would come across.
*
‘Your niece seems to be a rather nice girl,’ said Winston, as they pushed through the overgrown grass at the back of the Cedar House.
‘Oh, I am glad you like her!’
‘Does she do anything?’
‘No, I’m afraid not. She didn’t go to school and the school authorities only found out when she was nearly fifteen, so she couldn’t really get much of a job if she wanted one. She’s not clever, of course, not disagreeably clever I mean – she’s got plenty of common sense and so on.’ She paused. ‘She’ll have to get married, I wish I could find someone – she is a sweet girl, just a bit nervous, anxious to please, you know.’ Finola gazed up at the cold sky. ‘You wouldn’t like to marry her, would you?’
He started, and laughed. Finola, very much confused, tripped over a tussock of grass, and Winston prevented her falling by grabbing her sleeve. He did not let go for a moment. ‘I didn’t realise you were so much your mother’s daughter!’ he said as she vigorously brushed down her sheepskin coat. He had realised it, when he heard about her brisk confrontation with her mother-in-law.
‘Oh dear, you’re quite right, it’s exactly what Alice would have said. I didn’t mean it!’
Winston released her arm. ‘I’m far too old for her, surely?’ he said, smiling.
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