Friends and Lovers (25 page)

He paused, and the lightness went out of his voice.

“At least, as much as I can get you to myself at present.” Then they sat down at the small table beside a yellow-curtained window, and he pretended to be very matter-of-fact in seeing that she was comfortably settled and that dinner was ordered. Chicken cacciatore, he decided: tonight called for something more elaborate than spaghetti. And Chianti too.

Giuseppe, who always made a point of serving them, no matter where they had found a table, took the order quickly and bustled away with his wide grin and

“Si, si, signore. Subito.”

David stretched his hand across the white tablecloth and gripped Penny’s hand.

“Well,” he said, ‘aren’t you going to ask me why I came to London tonight?”

Penny, who had been wishing that Giuseppe would hurry up with the soup so that she could then begin to explain about the Fanes’ party and have done with the whole stupid thing, looked startled.

“Darling, I’m sorry,” she said quickly, and shook her head at her own stupidity.

“I’ve been sort of worried in a small way, and that makes one slow in the uptake.”

“What sort of worries?” he asked, forgetting his own news.

“Nothing important. They can wait until you tell me why you came to London.” She looked at him anxiously.

“Good news?” she asked hesitatingly. Yes, it was good, she decided. She smiled suddenly, wholeheartedly, and as he watched the deep blue of her eyes he thought of the laughing waters around Inchnamurren on a sunlit day.

“Did I ever tell you how beautiful you are?” he asked.

“Much too often for the sake of my vanity. David, what is your news?”

“Or that I love you?” He was smiling too.

“David, what is it?”

He was serious again.

“Desperately? For ever?”

“Darling, what is–-” She fell silent, and the colour in her cheeks mounted.

She said in a very low voice, “I love you too, David.”

He waited.

“For ever, David.”

“You don’t say that often enough.”

“It is about all that I do say in my letters.”

“Still not often enough. I want to hear it every day, not just read it.

Every day, every night. You know what I want.”

Then both were silent, both were thinking of last Sunday. He watched her face, with its emotions changing, following so quickly one on the other. He tightened his grasp on her wrist.

“Don’t worry, darling,” he said.

“It is my fault. I shouldn’t have even let you see how I really feel. I tried to write you about it this week, but it is difficult to put it down adequately on paper.

Sometimes you need expression in voice or eyes to help words to speak in the way you want them to speak. So I had to see you tonight. I began to worry I might have lost you.” And tonight, in that miserable waiting-room at Baker House, he had believed that he had lost her: this was the beginning of the flight, he had thought. And he had walked for an hour around the squares, watching lamplight on wet pavements and straggling naked branches, feeling the coldness of February strike into his heart. He smiled now, as he looked at her, but there was still uncertainty in his eyes.

“Did you begin to dislike me last week?” he asked half jokingly, but he was never more serious as he waited for the answer.

“David,” Penny said gently, and shook her head slowly, and there was so much love in her face that he could say nothing.

“It is my fault,” she said.

“It is just that I don’t want to be— to be rushed. Or perhaps I am a coward and full of inhibitions. I’ve got to be so sure in my own mind that I have no fears or doubts or anything. And yet I am sure I love you. I’m full of contradictions too, it seems. I love you, and I hurt you because I take love so seriously.”

“Don’t I?”

“Yes. I know you do. That is why I feel so inadequate. I shouldn’t need time to decide, I shouldn’t have any battle to fight with my mind. I do love you. And you love me. And nothing else matters. I know that. I know that I am so happy with you that every other happiness gets smaller and smaller.

And yet, I’m afraid, and I hesitate. I let you make love to me, love as violent as last Sunday’s. And yet I’m afraid and I hesitate. Although I want you to go on loving me and making love to me. What’s wrong with me, David? I am not being honest, am I?” She shook her head slowly, answering herself, disliking the answer. Then she went on, her voice now emotionless, arguing with herself as she had argued all this last week,

“Lillian Marston, for instance … She has had several men, and she has no misgivings. Yet she has never loved one of them in the way I love you. And she has never been loved in the way you love me either. I don’t mean to say that she doesn’t know what love is. But there is a casual quality about her way of loving. She calls it freedom.”

Penny hesitated again, and then her voice became tense as she continued.

“I think that only means she is afraid of going into love so deeply that she could never fall in love again. She feels it is too dangerous, in case he changed and fell out of love with her somehow. One could feel very alone, then, if one had loved so much that there was nothing left to give anyone else.”

David had been watching her face. Now he leaned forward and said quickly, “Is that what is worrying you about Giuseppe materialized from the other world. He sadly cleared the unfinished plates away, shrugged his shoulders, and produced an encouraging smile with the casserole of chicken. He set the salad before them with the vinegar and oil bottles, adjusted the pepper and salt and the mixing bowl, poured the wine into their glasses, and stood back for a moment to survey the effect. Too serious, he thought, as he left them.

Young people shouldn’t be too serious. What had young people to worry about?

“Let’s not start blaming ourselves. Penny,” David said.

“It isn’t our fault that we are faced with more problems than we bargained for.

We’ve been led to believe all our lives, and the propaganda still goes on, that love is quite a simple formula: all two people have to do is to fall in love, be faithful, wait peacefully for marriage, and the rest is a matter of living happily ever after. But it doesn’t work out like that. The trouble is that young men aren’t quite built that way.” He repressed a smile at his unconscious choice of words.

That’s the truest thing you’ve said tonight, he told himself wryly.

He said, “Moralists—and I think the first of them must have been an old man with a young wife—can say, “You shouldn’t do this: you ought to do that.” But if they are talking to young men in love they might as well tell a typhoid germ not to start a fever. I’m not unique.

Penny; you mustn’t think that.” He smiled openly now, as he remembered the variety of complications in the sex-life of all young men he knew.

“I am not a case for the medical text-books. There are millions of young men of my age going through the same mental contortions at this moment.” And physical, too, he thought grimly.

“If they have money, love is made an easier problem: they can get married right away. If they live in a less complicated cultural group, they can marry too; their families rally round, and they either build themselves a one-room house on their father’s small farm or they can share the family house and perhaps the family work.

Or they may belong to a group which doesn’t worry about marrying at all: they think that getting into bed with a girl is as natural as eating breakfast in the morning. They would probably not understand one word I’ve said: they would think that men like me are either mad or fools. Are we?” “No,” Penny said, “You aren’t mad or fools. You just have a lot more to overcome. And it doesn’t seem fair.” Giuseppe appeared once more. He said nothing this time, but he removed the cover of the earthenware dish to remind them.

Penny smiled, and David’s annoyance over the interruption vanished.

In a way the interruption had been good, for Penny’s voice was less despairing as she said, “I am not worth all this trouble, David. How much simpler it would have been for you to fall in love with some one like Lillian Marston.”

“And if you were like her, in how many months would you be leaving me? No, thank you: not for me.”

Penny gave a real smile this time.

“Darling, just be patient with me.

Just let me argue all this out for myself in my own way. It isn’t that I don’t want to—to have you and to be yours. It isn’t that. You said I didn’t want you enough.” She paused, remembering how that had hurt.

“David,” she said, with desperate sincerity, ‘it isn’t that. I want to be with you all the time. I want you to make love to me. So it can’t be that I don’t want you enough. It is just that a girl—oh, I don’t know, but she is so influenced by her family and surroundings and everything. Men are so much more free in their decisions, you know. They are independent. If men and women were judged by equal standards, then it would be different. We could be courageous too.

But for generations and generations we’ve been dependent and obedient, and that has put a kind of deep fear into us. Isn’t that it, David?”

“If you weren’t afraid of hurting your family you would do what you felt was right for yourself? Would you?” He tried to make his voice sound casual.

“Yes,” Penny admitted very slowly.

“Yes,” she said honestly.

David relaxed. It was the family. A man could deal with the barriers which a family had raised. Frigidity could never be dealt with. He said, “I have even thought of giving up Oxford, of looking for a job, any job, anywhere. Now.”

Penny shook her head.

“Later, if things did not go well for you, I’d always blame myself. As I got older and uglier I’d think I had forced you into a very bad bargain. I’d blame myself for having ruined your life.”

David began to laugh, Then don’t ruin so easily,” he said.” Not if their wives keep them happy. Besides, we aren’t all the geniuses which we like to think we are, we know that.”

Giuseppe, looking for the fifth time towards the table at the window, was delighted to see them happy again. The young man was laughing, and the girl was smiling in the way she used to smile. They were even beginning to taste the food. That was a good sign, a very good sign. If they could eat food that was half cold and not notice it, then they must be still in love.

The young man was drinking his wine now. Good, very good. She wasn’t going to leave him after all.

These English were very strange indeed: imagine choosing a restaurant to persuade your mistress to keep on living with you. Imagine, even, persuading with words! Still, the young man had succeeded. At this moment her eyes were filled with sunshine like the waters before Napoli. Giuseppe smiled too, as he hurried downstairs, summoned by a piercing scream from the cash-desk.

“This,” David said, as he looked at his glass of wine, ‘reminds me that I came here to celebrate a decision. You still haven’t found out why I am here in London tonight to see you.”

Penny studied his face.. “It is good news, anyway,” she said.

“What is it, David? It is good, isn’t it?”

“I think so.” He was trying to be noncommittal. The attempt failed.

“I have been deciding about this future job of mine.”

Penny stared blankly.

“I thought it was all decided. You were going to sit the Foreign Office examinations after you finished with Oxford.”

“I’ve changed my mind,” he said briefly.

“I had the offer of two possible jobs this week. Isn’t it extraordinary how you can think and worry about a job, and then suddenly two arrive almost at the same time? All or nothing, it seems, in this world. I wanted to hear what you thought about them, Penny. That is why I came chasing up here to-day. Tomorrow I have to lunch with one of the men who is offering me a job.”

“David, why did you change your mind?”

David didn’t answer that.

“The first job,” he said, ‘is one with an oil company. Abroad, of course, in some peculiar place with the temperature around one hundred and ten degrees.

But they do offer a princely salary. One thousand a year, flat, to start with. It goes on to incredible heights, if they like you.” “A thousand pounds?” Penny said incredulously.

“David, that’s terrific. But, darling, what do you know about oil?” “Nothing,” David said cheerfully.

“The oil firm is picking out two or three young men from the Universities for certain jobs. That’s all.

What do you think of it?”

“A thousand pounds is an awful lot of money,” Penny said slowly.

“Are you sure they really were in earnest?”

David repressed a smile.

“Quite,” he said.

“And what is the other job?”

“It is with Edward Fairbairn.”

“The economist? The man who is interested in political things?”

“Yes.” This time David smiled.

“He has just bought the old Economic Outlook, and he is going to turn it into a weekly magazine dealing with politics here and abroad. He is especially interested in employment and unemployment. He’s against the dole, for instance.

Says that it is only patting on a soothing ointment to a dangerous cancer: what we need is some intelligent surgery that will get to its root. That’s the idea, vaguely, on which he is going to make a fairly large-sized report.

He has offered me the chance to join his staff.

I’d be working mostly on material for his report on seasonal unemployment, although I’d have a permanent job on his paper. That would give the steady salary. Three hundred pounds a year. Reviewing and articles on the side would probably bring in another fifty pounds—perhaps even a hundred. How does it sound?”

“And after the report was finished?”

“I should then concentrate on political articles and reporting, perhaps with a chance to travel. There is also a definite rise in salary if I am any good. If not I get chucked out on my ear. Fair enough.”

“But, David, I don’t quite understand.” Penny was really perplexed.

In the Foreign Office you’d get almost three hundred pounds a year to start with. And you never get chucked out there. Not unless you get all tangled up in some scandal with a woman or something like that. So why give up the F .0. idea and think of Fairbairn?”