Friends and Lovers (20 page)

Everything, he suddenly realized, depended on this answer.

She said in a low voice, “It isn’t nonsense, David.”

Watching her eyes, he believed her. He touched her hand The waiter drew near once more: there were still other) tips to be earned this evening.

“Let’s go,” David said quickly, and helped her with her coat The moment was lost. She was talking to him in he) natural voice again; he was being equally matter-of-fact and composed as they passed the crowding tables and at lasi came into the street.

“We had them specially arranged for you,” he said, as the^ stood for a moment looking at the clear stars which shone ir the crisp autumn sky.

“Now what about a theatre?”

“Whatever you like,” she said. She was still looking at the stars.

“No, it is what you want. Something serious or something gay?”

“Might we walk, first of all?” she asked.

“It is a heavenly night, and I’ve been sitting in a train practically all day. Anc I never have walked about a city at night. It would be fun Besides,” she smiled up at him as they fell into step, “I’ve hac a lovely time already. You are spoiling me, you know.” It was awfully expensive, she thought: he can’t possibly afford to spend so much money on me as all that in one night.

“Let me worry about that,” he said.

“Penny, you are the strangest girl.”

That was what her mother often said, but David was noi saying it in her mother’s way. He made it sound like a compliment.

She said in embarrassment, “I ought to worry about it, David. Because you give too much.” She thought of this journey to meet her as she looked down at the violets which she carried.

“No one ever told me that before,” he said, which was true enough. He had never met any attractive girls who had not accepted everything quite calmly as if it were their due. And then, still thinking over her words, he began to worry. Had she meant she didn’t want so much from him, didn’t want to accept anything more than she was willing to return?

Penny was doing her own share of wondering. On how many girls had he spent so much thought and time and money as he had spent on her to-day? And why should she use the past tense? How many girls now, of which she was one?

Men were so easy about that sort of thing. All they had to say to a girl if they liked her was, “Are you free on Friday? Good. Let’s say seven o’clock.” But no woman, however much she liked a man, could say,

“Are you free on Friday? Good. Let’s say seven o’clock.” Penny was suddenly miserable. She was too proud, she admitted, to take any pleasure in being one of several girls. But, most of all, she was probably being a serious fool: men wrote letters to women, asked them out; and it generally meant little more than a diversion, an amusing way to escape from boredom.

She wondered, then, why she had not thought of this before, why she should ever have been so confident that David was different. Because she had wanted to believe that? She still wanted to believe it.

They walked on in silence, each aware of it, each worrying that it confirmed their fears. There were few people in this district at this hour. Inside the clubs, impersonal in their remote dignity, men digested their leisurely dinner with no women to hurry them away from their port. The broad, immaculate street, the solid buildings, the richly lighted rooms behind the screened windows, all culminated in the feeling of expensive restraint.

David quickened his pace unconsciously.

“I’m sorry,” he said, as her ankle twisted and he steadied her by the arm.

“I’ve been walking too quickly.”

“No.”

He looked at her, wondering what he had done to frighten her away from him again. He halted beside one of the large monuments which decorated Waterloo Place. In front of them were the broad steps which led down to the Mall, with its green park and its spaced trees, now a mass of black and blacker shadows. Beyond the grass and trees were the shapes of dark buildings cutting into the night sky, turning the modern city into a stage setting for a medieval play; mounting walls, turrets, spires; and then the moon-like face of Big Ben rising high above its tall tower’s solid shadow.

To the south, across the river, rose the glow from the clustering lights of unseen streets and crowding houses, a living background to these dark shapes of stone which guarded them so coldly.

“Penny,” he said, “Penny, look at me. What’s wrong?” “Nothing,” she said, and smiled to prove it.

“Penny,” he said, and grasped her arm.

“Look, I know this may sound madness, but it isn’t madness to me. I’d rather blurt everything out right now, even if I do frighten you off, and for good.

At least I’ll know where I stand. You must know that there’s only one reason why I came to meet you this afternoon; the same reason why I am going to go on seeing you whenever I can. Any objections to that idea?”

He watched the pretended smile fade, her eyes avoiding his no longer.

For a moment she stood like that, unmoving, expressionless. And then a gentle curve came back to her lips. He bent down suddenly and kissed them.

As he drew back, as startled as she was, he saw from her eyes that there was no further reason needed, no reason even now wanted. He kissed her again, more slowly, deliberately, and yet with no sense of calculation. It seemed to him that he had never made a more natural gesture in all his life. Then he heard footsteps near them, and a woman’s high thin voice saying, “Really!” He looked round angrily, to see an expensively dressed back walking quickly away from them, with her companion hurrying on his short legs to catch up with her retreat.

Damn her, he thought savagely, and looked anxiously at Penny. But Penny was smiling.

“David,” she said, and reached up to kiss him lightly on his cheek.

He caught her hand as they laughed, and they ran down the flight of broad, shallow steps into the Mall.

Under the plane-trees, walking arm-in-arm with th sir hands clasped as if to double their hold on each other, he said, “I

am sorry. Penny.. I should have waited until we had crossed over here, where it is less public. Or, at least,” as he looked round and saw the other couples strolling arm-in-arm or sitting together on the seats which edged St. James’s Park, ‘or, at least, not quite so well lighted.” Damn that woman, he thought again, and her shocked voice pulling everything down to the level of her own mind.

“I was sorry for her,” Penny said.

“I saw her face, you know. It looked as if it could do with some kissing.”

He laughed, and his anger was gone. He had been afraid, not for what the woman had thought, but of the effect of her open scorn on Penny.

It could have pushed her right back into that tight wall of convention which had encircled her for so many years. And yet he could be thankful too to that tight wall. He had learned that when he kissed her. Her whole body had stiffened, and her lips had been afraid for a fraction of the first moment.

He would never need to wonder, when she kissed him, who had taught her so well.

Penny did not appear to notice the couples sitting so closely together, so motionless, as if they were in a drugged dream, but her pace quickened slightly, and she started as a policeman’s light flickered on and then off.

For a brief minute the light focused on a bewildered young man and woman, looking up in annoyance and sudden worry. But the policeman must have approved of them, for he left them sitting there. Another couple was not so lucky. David noticed the woman’s face, with the pretty, moronic look of the night wanderer. He increased their pace still more.

“Too many people about,” he said lightly, and hid his disappointment in a complicated description of his new digs at Oxford. This took them through Admiralty Arch into Charing Cross.

T do believe you are more conventional than I am!” Penny said, as she looked back over her shoulder at the comparative peace of the Mall.

“All I am looking for is a quiet spot where we can talk without having to shut our ears to at least five-conversations going on around us.” He looked wryly at the busy traffic. “And this Bedlam isn’t much help, either. Let’s cut down Whitehall to the river. We may find some peace there. Or are you tired? We are too late now for a theatre. But what about the flicks? Or some place with music?”

“Not tonight, David. I have to be careful about the time, you see. We are all locked up for the night in Baker House at eleven-thirty. That is, if we get permission. Or else we must be in by nine o’clock. They insist on our beauty sleep, it seems.” She pretended to be amused at the idea, but it still rankled.

“Besides,” she went on, ‘we couldn’t hear ourselves think in a night-club, either.”

True enough, David thought. Hell, why should it be made so difficult for two people to be alone with each other? Waiters, women with raised eyebrows, policemen with torches, couples jammed two or even three to a bench along the Mall, no talking in theatres or cinemas, crowded tables and non-stop bands in night-clubs and restaurants.

What did a man with little money do if he didn’t want to share his girl with a hundred or a thousand other people?

Penny waited for his answer, but when it didn’t come she said gently, “I’m sorry, David. I ruined all your plans for this evening. But I did want a walk. And I still do.” She looked round at the changing shapes of silent buildings, and then towards the sky, dark, cool, and clean.

“Don’t you like it too?”

He answered her this time by smiling, by taking her arm again, even if they were in an austerely public street. His feeling of having arranged things so badly disappeared; he relaxed and felt perfectly content.

And Penny, conscious of his arm through hers, conscious of the smile on his face, was happy too. Her feet almost danced over the pavement.

Her heart was singing. And in her joy she gave her pity generously to all the women she passed, who could not have David walking beside them.

The Embankment and gardens, south of Westminster, were almost deserted at this hour. The river, swollen by the high September tides, was running smoothly and gently, mocking the sandbags propped up against the Embankment walls at their weaker points. The bright lights of the bridges were strung above the dark water, a glittering necklace of lamps displayed against velvet as black as that of any jeweller’s calculated window. Occasional tugs and barges moved in slow, steady progress; if it were not for the reflections of the lights on the water, broken and lengthened as they glanced over the uneven surface of its deep currents, you might not have guessed the strength of the river which held the boats in constant struggle. The stars were clear and high. Their imitators, evenly spaced along the city streets, had distracted your eyes from the real beauty of the night sky. But here, above the dark water, the sky was dominant again. The individual noises of a great city merged with each other into the steady hum of some giant dynamo, into a background of droning power against which you could hear the gentle insistent rhythm of the lapping water below your feet. Here, on the Embankment, with its feeling of distance from noise and light, was a sense of escape from the machine of living.

They reached Gower Street ten minutes before Baker House barred its door for the night. So they walked slowly round the quiet Bloomsbury square which lay behind Gower Street, unwilling to leave each other a minute before they must.

“When am I going to see you again?” David asked.

“The difficulty is,” he explained, “I am as tied down by rules and regulations as you are.

I can come up for an evening, provided I catch the Flying Fornic—the train that gets me back to Oxford in time before the gates are locked. The colleges are all locked up by twelve, you see. After then you climb over the wall in a dark patch where you won’t be spotted easily.”

Penny looked at him worriedly.

“What about tonight?”

“Term hasn’t begun yet, and I’m in digs with no more walls to climb, and my landlady seems to be a decent sort. Only, when term does start she will have to stick to the rules or lose her licence.”

“You mean she has got to see that you are safely inside her house?”

“Or she would not be allowed a licence to rent her rooms to undergraduates.

There is nothing like the economic screw to tighten up the good old moral standards.”

“What happens if you break the rules?” It seemed all so fantastic somehow.

The undergraduates looked like men; they talked like men.

Was something wrong with them that they couldn’t be treated like men?

“You are up on the carpet before the Dean of your college. You can be gated—which is a sort of confined to barracks— for a week or so, or you can be fined. If you collect one interview too many with the Dean you can be sent down. Permanently if the Dean’s patience has worn out.”

“Lord, David! Will you be able to catch the next train?”

“I’ll make it. Don’t worry. Penny.” He smiled at her anxiety, but he was ridiculously pleased by it.

“I only told you all this you see. We are all locked up for the night in Bi eleven-thirty. That is, if we get permission. Or be in by nine o’clock. They insist on our be; seems.” She pretended to be amused at the ide rankled.

“Besides,” she went on, ‘we couldn’t b think in a night-club, either.”

True enough, David thought. Hell, why shoul so difficult for two people to be alone with Waiters, women with raised eyebrows, pol torches, couples jammed two or even three to a the Mall, no talking in theatres or cinemas, cr and non-stop bands in night-clubs and restaur ai a man with little money do if he didn’t want to with a hundred or a thousand other people?

Penny waited for his answer, but when it die said gently, “I’m sorry, David. I ruined all your evening. But I did want a walk. And I still do round at the changing shapes of silent buildir towards the sky, dark, cool, and clean.

“Don’t yo He answered her this time by smiling, by ta again, even if they were in an austerely publ feeling of having arranged things so badly dis relaxed and felt perfectly content.

And Penny, conscious of his arm through hi of the smile on his face, was happy too. He danced over the pavement. Her heart was singin joy she gave her pity generously to all the worm who could not have David walking beside them.