Friends and Lovers (16 page)

“She’ll probably forget all about it.”

“No, no. After all, she came asking me to take on the job. I didn’t go begging her for it.”

“What were they like? The boys you tutored, I mean.”

“Decent enough. But between you and me, Meg, there were moments when I thought they were solid teak above here.” He placed his forefingers across his eyebrows.

“So it wasn’t all holiday,” his sister conceded. She rose to deal with the bubbling kettle. She was in good humour again: she was reassured about Cornwall.

“Not entirely,” her brother said, with quiet irony, which was lost in the ritual of heating the brown teapot. It would have been a wonderful place for a real holiday, he thought.

“You’ll find some cold meat in the pantry,” Margaret was saying.

David took the hint, and went foraging for his sandwich. The pantry window was wide open, protected from flies and marauding cats by a gauze-wire screen. The milk-bottle stood on a marble slab in front of the window for coolness, but even so the milk had turned sour. A damned waste, he thought angrily.

“What is Scotland like?” Margaret was saying.

“Whom did you meet?”

David brought some cold mutton into the kitchen, and the small brown crock which held butter floating in salted water. He planked them down on the table.

“Better wash first and get rid of the grime,” he said.

“What’s Scotland like?” Margaret repeated.

“Not that one, David; that’s the dish-towel. Over there … that’s right.”

“I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow,” he said.

“You go up to bed, Margaret. I’ll have a sandwich and then turn in too.”

“I’m going to have a cup of tea. It’s too warm to sleep anyway, so we may as well talk.”

David thought of the letter he wanted to write and post so that it could reach Edinburgh by tomorrow night. He began totell her about Loch Innish.

He talked, too, of Inchnamurren and Dr. MacLntyre.

Briefly, because he had the feeling, once he did start to talk, that Margaret’s attention was not always focused on what he was saying; it was strange how people could ask you to explain something, and then after the first few sentences they would hardly bother to listen. If you stopped explaining, of course, they would be hurt. He didn’t say anything, however, about the Lorrimer family beyond a short reference to their visit to Inchnamurren. He knew instinctively that Margaret would be antagonized by the idea of Penny. She had sulked for weeks when she had learned about Eleanor Fenton-Stevens, for instance: a cool, calculated sulking to show her disapproval. She had never given any reason for it, even after Eleanor and the sulking period were both over.

“It must have been wonderful,” Margaret said.

“How I envy you, David.

You get all the luck, don’t you?”

“Well–-” he said, and then smiled and said no more about that.

“Perhaps we’d better turn in now. You will have a lot of packing to do tomorrow.”

“I’ve packed everything already. I don’t need so very much for two or three weeks. Just as well, isn’t it, considering the state of my wardrobe? And Cornwall is so very quiet.”

“Well, why not choose a gayer place if you want it? You will have money enough for a decent holiday,” David said, trying to keep his voice even.

“Oh, it is all settled. Florence is expecting me. She has been having a miserably lonely summer, and she would never forgive me if I didn’t go. She is counting the weeks until she can be back in London. She will probably be qualified by next spring.”

“Qualified as what?” David couldn’t resist asking. *A piano mover

Florence Rawson, the large, raw-boned daughter of a country doctor in Cornwall, had met Margaret at the College of Music in their first year as students there. Florence was going to be the composer, Margaret the concert pianist. Time had altered Margaret’s plans: when her mother died she had had to come home here to look after her father, and she could only manage to attend an occasional class once or twice a week. But her friendship with Florence Rawson had increased, and they never seemed bored with each other or their ideas however much these were repeated. They were egocentrics whose thoughts were like a pleasing reflection in a mirror. Narcissus-like, Margaret and Florence would gaze at them for months without any distaste, any self-criticism. Probably for years, David considered. But then, he didn’t particularly like Florence Rawson. Her tweeds and booming laugh and hearty step, her perpetual assumption that men, were either fools or in league to keep women from the major careers in life, filled him with horror.

“You don’t need to be so cruel about Florence,” Margaret said, in swift defence.

“She’s as clever as you are—perhaps cleverer.” “That wouldn’t be difficult,” David said lightly. He rose, and cleared away the cups and saucers.

“Come on, Meg, let’s get to bed. I am beginning to feel exhausted.”

She said suddenly, “You are going up to Oxford the week before term starts, aren’t you?”

David looked at her in surprise.

“I don’t know yet. I might stay here until term begins.” At the end of September Penny would be arriving in London.

“But you said you were going up early to Oxford this term.”

*I have been thinking it would be cheaper to stay here: it would save me an extra week of batt els

“Why can’t you say ” bills”? That Oxford talk gives me a pain, as if you were all in some secret society or something.” Her voice was angry.

“Every one says batt els and has been saying it for centuries: it won’t be dropped just because you don’t like it, Margaret.” He looked at her worried face.

“Come on. Out with it. Why do you want me to go back a week earlier than necessary?”

She was disconcerted by the unexpected question. She hesitated, and then came out with the truth flatly.

“I’ve asked Florence to come here for that week.”

David stared at her.

“You mean she is going to have my room?”

“Don’t get angry. You’ll waken Father. Besides, as long as you haven’t a job, just where are we to find a guest-room when we need it?”

He ignored the jibe.

“How long is she going to be here?”

“Until she finds new digs. Her landlady last year was horrid.

Objected to the piano being played.”

“Probably didn’t want it to be pounded into matchwood.”

“You can save your witticsms for Oxford. You are all so gay and lordly there, aren’t you?”

David restrained his rising temper.

“Did you ask Father about this? I don’t imagine an invalid particularly enjoys a stranger crashing all over his house.”

“Florence won’t disturb Father. Besides, you might remember that if it weren’t for me this house would not exist. Who looks after it and keeps it going? As well as giving those awful piano lessons to make enough money for a little tuition at the College of Music?”

As usual, David was beaten. When Margaret started enumerating her virtues he was always beaten.

David said, “Look this is a silly hour of the morning to start having arguments. Come on, Meg.” He walked over to the kitchen window opened it, and promptly let two large moths and a swarm of gnats into the room.

“Oh, damn!” he said.

“Switch off the light, Meg, and keep the rest of these blighters outside.

Why can’t there be something invented to let you have windows open and lights on and still be comfortable in summer?”

Then are so good at changing the subject,” Margaret said acidly, as she rose and switched out the light.

And some women, David thought, don’t change the subject often enough.

Anyway, the light was now out, and they could start moving upstairs, and he could have half an hour of peace before he went to bed. But he found himself standing by the window, looking out into the small square of garden turned to silver in the bright moonlight. The rambling roses, which his mother had planted some years ago, now spread over the wooden fences which separated this garden from the others. The grass was worn thin in patches where his father’s invalid-chair rested through the day.

Margaret came over to stand beside him. She watched him curiously.

“What is worrying you?” she asked. Six weeks in Scotland .

Oxford … What had he to complain about?

David said slowly, “Father. There is a big change in him even in these last six weeks. I got quite a shock when I saw him.” David suddenly saw again the thin, hopeless face staring up at the blank ceiling.

“Wish we could get him into the country.”

“How? James, bring round the Rolls no, I think the Daimler tonight, and we’ll drive down to Little Toad-in-the-Hole.” She paused, and then, as David didn’t reply, the mockery left her voice, and she said, “Don’t worry, David. Father is all right. I look after him well. It is probably only this ghastly weather. You know we tried to persuade him to go and live in the country. But he says that London has always been his home, and that he is lonely when he’s away from it. He likes the distant noises: he listens for the trains, and for the boats on the river. And he sits for hours beside his bedroom window watching the children playing in the Walk.

Besides, what would I do in the country?”

“He has lost heart since Mother died; that’s what is wrong with him,” David said.

“That’s the whole trouble.” His father had been an uncomplaining invalid, even cheerful, in spite of the long, throttling siege of illness. It had tightened slowly but surely from the time he had been invalided out of the Army he had been one of the survivors of the Kut garrison partly because of wounds, partly because of some Middle East microbe which continued to attack him long after the wounds had healed. At first his father had resented the idea of being condemned to illness for the rest of his life: he had tried to pick up his career where 1914 had interrupted it. But that had been impossible. It was then that his mother, the impractical woman, had become the practical leader of the family: they had moved from St. John’s Wood to this house in Cory’s Walk, and their whole life had been scaled down to meet the new necessity. And his mother had succeeded, with work and care and thought, in making a home where there could even be laughter. But now his father’s will to live had gone. In these last four years he had become silent and moody.

“In spite of all their bad luck, they were really happy,” David said quietly.

Margaret was silent for a moment.

“The moonlight is making you sentimental,” she said briefly. Wouldn’t Mother have been happier if she had never married? She would have made a big success as a concert pianist.

“How could she ever have been happy?” Margaret added, in a harsh, angry voice.

“She was,” David said quietly.

“You had only to look at her face to see that. She never thought she had sacrificed anything, compared to what Father had given up. He would have been a good architect if the War hadn’t come along. And he was never as bitter about that as he could have been. Said he wasn’t the only one who was left a crock.”

“And just how much credit was given us for that? Those who didn’t suffer because of the War forgot very easily, it seems to me.”

David glanced quickly at his sister’s bitter face.

“It would have been worse for all of us if we had lost the War. That’s what Father keeps saying, and he is right. What angers him to-day is the way we forget that, the way that it has become fashionable not to talk like that.

It is a pity, isn’t it, that people will follow fashions even if it kills them? Like a lot of diabetics insisting on eating chocolates.”

Margaret stirred impatiently, and then moved slowly towards the kitchen door.

She didn’t like this kind of talk.

Father’s mind had never progressed beyond the year 1919, but it was a pity that he should influence David like this. David, with all his advantages .

In such moments she always chose to forget that David had provided for his own education since the age of twelve by winning competitive examinations, that he had already won three scholarships to Oxford, which not only paid for his tuition and lodgings and food, but allowed a margin for a careful budget in books and clothes. ) “It is after two o’clock. I’m going to bed,” she said.

Good, David thought.

“Besides, the War was all a mistake,” Margaret went on, not leaving well enough alone.

“We should stop talking about it.”

“I’ve always wondered why a war should have been thought important enough to let so many be killed and maimed if it can be forgiven and forgotten so easily.”

“If every one had been like the workers, with no vested interests to think of, there would have been no war.”

“Aren’t you forgetting nationalism? The German workers put on uniforms and marched. The others had to march too, or be marched over. You’ve found every reason why there should have been no war, except the practical one.

What do you do when another nation puts on uniform and starts marching? Just lie down and wave your legs feebly?”

“Don’t be so coarse, David. The trouble with you is that you don’t take things seriously enough. You are just not politically conscious, that’s all.”

David grinned.

“Been seeing much of Breen recently?” he asked innocently. Roger Breen, another of Margaret’s peculiar friends … Why couldn’t Meg choose some one who was pleasant to have about the house just for a change?

Margaret said nothing, but the way she set down her feet on the stairs and the angle at which she held her head described her annoyance sufficiently.

She was probably thinking up some corker to give him as a parting thought.

David was right: she paused at her bedroom door to say, “It never is any use arguing with your preconceived ideas, David. Your holiday with the rich and powerful has only made you more of a reactionary.” J David still smiled, but his eyes had hardened.

“See you at breakfast,” he said.

“I’ve got a scarf tucked away somewhere in my bag for you; couldn’t find that Gaelic music, but we may be able to track it down in London if it interests you.”

Thank you, David. You shouldn’t have bothered.” She was embarrassed, conscious of the change in her tone of voice.” I’m sorry I was cross.