Friends and Lovers (44 page)

“Anyone can see that. We need the poets to show us the beauty that still exists, however hidden. That’s what poets are for …”

She looked, and looked naturally enough as her grandfather had to admit, at the top row of the bookcase beside the armchair.

I see you’ve been collecting some poetry there,” he said, as his glance followed hers.

“Isn’t that something new for you?”

His hand went out automatically, and he picked up a volume, and let the pages ripple slowly through his fingers. He halted at the group of poems called Michael Robartes and the Dancer. Yes, he was thinking, let a poet clothe his conceptions with new images of striking beauty. Let him give richness and life to his ideas, phrased in such sound that those of us who listen will remember their music.

Penny had said. That’s -what poets are for … Yes, that is what poets are for.

His eyes paused at The Second Coming, and he turned over no more pages, but let himself read it once more, silently, slowly: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? * * Quoted from Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, (MacMillan), by permission of Mrs. W. B. Yeats.

Penny let him read and said nothing; and because she saw that something had moved him deeply—for when he was finished he let the book lie on his lap for a moment, his eyes fixed broodingly before him—she did not even dare ask what poem it had been. Then he suddenly closed the book, replaced it quickly in its narrow place on the shelf beside another volume of Yeats, and was once more back with her in the room.

She said, “David has been giving me these books. I am sure he thinks—although he has never actually said it, of course— that I don’t read enough poetry. So this is his way of propagandizing me.”

“And does it work?”

She smiled and nodded, and then she laughed.

“Yes,” she admitted.

Dr. MacLntyre lit his pipe very carefully. And then, as his silence became too obvious, and Penny would not speak, he was forced to say, “And how is David?”

And that was the way in which the subject of David and Penny was introduced.

Now Dr. MacLntyre asked no more questions, but let her tell him what her good sense chose to tell He had only to watch Penelope, to listen to the earnestness behind her words, to see the light in her eyes when she talked of David or the worry there when she spoke of her family, to know that she was neither irresponsible nor thoughtless. That was what he had wanted to know.

Now he realized that this ‘affair,” as Mary and Charles Lorrimer would insist on calling it, was not something flaunted as a piece of youthful bravado.

“Temporary affair,” Charles had said, emphasizing both words bitterly.

“Temporary’ was the one word which Dr. MacLntyre himself would not have forgiven.

“So you see. Grandfather–-” Penny ended. She left her words there, adding nothing. She was watching him anxiously.

He measured his words carefully.

“I see that you have a considerable enthusiasm for this young man,” he remarked dryly. And my journey is not yet over, he reminded himself. I shall have no peace of mind now until I see David Bosworth, to discover for myself if his enthusiasm for Penny is equally considerable and permanent.

That is all I want to feel. Then I shall write Mary and Charles that the only thing they should worry over is this refusal of theirs to let Penelope and David be married.

“Now what about some fresh air? I always feel suffocated in London,” he said, and rose to his feet.

Penny suggested Hampton Court.

“I was there in March with David,” she said.

“You’ll get plenty of fresh air. I remember I caught a cold.”

She spoke the words happily, as if catching a cold could be an enjoyable experience.

“I haven’t been there for almost thirty years,” her grandfather admitted.

“But if you have visited it so recently you’ll make a very good guide.”

“I’ll be responsible for the geography,” Penny promised, ‘if you, as the historian, will supply the dates.”

But, strangely enough, once they did arrive out at Hampton Court, Penny was not a very good guide. Her memory, usually clear and accurate, seemed to have deserted her. Faced with Clock Court, Base Court, Fountain Court, Chapel Court, Round Kitchen Court, she became bewildered. And inside the Palace of almost a thousand rooms she was even less capable. From the Colonnade at the south end of the Clock Court she led her grandfather up a large noble staircase which surely was the approach to the Great Hall.

Instead they found themselves in an oak-panelled room surrounded by weapons.

“Well,” her grandfather said philosophically, “I suppose I had to see the King’s Guard Room, anyway. Much more important than the Great Hall, I’m sure. Now we shall try for Queen Anne’s Drawing Room and end up in Henry the Eighth’s Wine Cellar.”

Penny looked at him ruefully.

“I’m awfully sorry,” she said. She was remembering that her grandfather prided himself on wasting no time if he had to go sightseeing. Once he had suggested that the Oxford English Dictionary should bring its definition of tourist more up to date.

“Tourist: a man who gets lost, a man with shortening temper, a man with sore feet. Of . detour.” “Not at all,” he said, with a smile, as if he were highly enough amused by an idea, now forming, about her last visit here.

“And this kind of sightseeing really is a great improvement over the usual variety: this has all the joy of the unexpected.”

“I do remember the Board Walk and the gardens and the Tijou Screen,” Penelope protested. She added, with a smile to match her grandfather’s, “Once I find them, that is.”

They did eventually, with the help of a guide-book and directions from two guides.

“There’s the screen of panels,” Penny said with relief, looking towards the set of tall wrought-iron gates leading to the river.

“Extremely sharp memory, considering how unobtrusive they are.”

Penny’s cheeks reddened, and there was an amused apology in the way she glanced at him.

Then she settled her arm comfortably on her grandfather’s, and paced slowly with him through the gardens.

“At least,” she remarked appeasingly, ‘you are getting fresh air.”

“Is that what it is? I was puzzled for a moment.”

Penny thought. Everything is all right. He isn’t angry with me about David.

He never is angry when he starts teasing me … She smiled at her grandfather. He was walking, she suddenly noticed, more slowly than she remembered.

He was saying, “Now that I have begun this journey I shall make the most of it. I am going to Oxford to see Chaundler, probably for a week or two. Then I shall go to Paris to see Latisse at the Sorbonne.

There are some points about the summing up in my book which I want to discuss with him. Then I shall return to London by July. Unless I am tempted to take a little trip with Latisse into the Beaune country.

That might help to inspire me in that lecture at the Sorbonne if I am asked to give it.” “Will you see David in Oxford?” Penny asked.

“I hope so. You told me he was working hard, but perhaps he can spare an hour or so for me.”

“Of course he will. He wants to see you, I know.” “That was what he said in his last letter to me.” Dr. MacIntyre paused, and then asked quite simply, “When are you going to see him next?”

Penelope looked squarely at her grandfather.

“He is coming to London this weekend,” she said.

“Then, after that, I shall’t see him until his Finals are over.”

“And then?”

“We have still to discuss that. We shall probably make the decision this weekend.”

*I hope it will be the right one, Penelope.”

“What is ” right”? Right for Mother and Father? Or right for David and me?”

Dr. MacLntyre hesita then halted.

“Yes, I know. There this. It was forced on us ” Out of the best of mother love you.”

Penny was silent.

“I makes everything so we away in dejection. She flies fluttering so unde wide border of flowers. was her first touch of bi strange ways of show even write, but set Moi: through her letters. Wt don’t they realize that f shutting up a daughte: water I still wouldn’t ch ” Now, now, Penelope children of your own things that worried yc Frankly, I never appre had to sit up night af three years old and had being five myself, and h I had scarlet fever. Yes, then.”

“But, Grandfather, I what Mother and Fame I warned Mary last thought: I told her thi towards the children.

“You are angry with n ” No, Penny. Not angry “Please don’t. Not y from him, stared fixed perfect formation, adva of tears over her eyes. ^ circles on straight lines, to turn them red. A r< that matters is appear an of the people who thou^ He patted her arm awkwardly, knowing then how much he could hurt her.

Not you too. If he failed her, like the others … “I’m sorry, my dear. We who are old forget so very easily that young people are capable of dealing with life by themselves. They don’t need us as much as we should like to believe.” He paused, and then asked, “You are confident?”

*I know what I am doing,” Penny said slowly. She was groping for words to explain what she felt.

“There are some things in life which men and women have got to decide for themselves. Not impulsively.

Arguing it all out, really believing in what they do. Isn’t that true?”

“Yes,” her grandfather agreed. It was equally true that those who did not argue their actions out, for themselves and by themselves, lost control of their own life. Even the first decision of a four-year-old child, whether to tell a lie and escape punishment or to be truthful and take the consequences a hard decision, for the right one meant pain and the wrong one meant no reproof), went towards building the future man or woman.

He suddenly realized that Penny was speaking again.

“I’m sorry, my dear,” he said. T digress mentally nowadays. Something is said, and I agree or disagree, but that isn’t enough, it seems. I must go wandering off.” He smiled.

“What was it you were saying?”

“I was saying that sometimes in life there’s a crisis forced on us.”

“Not sometimes. Always. At repeated intervals.”

“If we accept it, don’t fight against it, we may have tragedy. And we have only ourselves to blame. I mean—oh, I am putting this so badly.”

“Give me a practical example,” suggested Dr. MacLntyre shrewdly.

“Take David and yourself, for instance.”

“Well, we could have been separated by our families. If we had accepted that, then we would always have regretted what we had lost.

I mean, if we hadn’t made sure that nothing was going to separate us, if we hadn’t—I mean–-”

“You mean that you were faced with what might have been the elements of, tragedy? And that, by adjusting your lives to beat them instead of accepting them, you have averted the tragedy? But what of other things—what of worry, malicious gossip, scandal? They could mean tragedy too.”

“The only real tragedy would be to forget the value of what David and I have together.”

“Did David say that, or is it you?” Dr. MacLntyre asked, with a wry smile.

He had been hearing echoes of David all afternoon. As it should be, of course: two people fell in love, and if they were to stay in love, then a third personality, a joint one to which they each contributed, was created between them. No doubt when he saw David in Oxford he would see this third personality shaping too. If he didn’t, then he would have real cause to worry about his granddaughter.

“David,” she admitted.

“But I came to believe that too, in my own way, in my own time. So we are both saying it to you. We believe it.

And each day we are together proves it. And all the days we aren’t together prove it too. That is why I said that it could only be our decisions that mattered. We are happy when we are together, we are miserable without each other. Only we can know how much.”

“I see,” he said gently. He suddenly wished that he could live to see what his Penelope and her David made of their lives … Then he realized that, even by this regret, he was expressing his confidence in them.

He said happily, “Well, anyone listening to us this afternoon could tell that one of us was very young and one of us was very old.”

“Why?” Penny slackened her pace to match his as they turned to leave the gardens.

“Because we have been talking about Life. What is the next subject up for discussion? Religion?”

Penny laughed, pressing his arm.

“I want to hear all about Inchnamurren. I shall’t be able to visit it this summer, you know.”

Never again shall I have the long days there, she thought. Long holidays were a thing of the past, which you put away with your childhood—lazy, unhurried days in a magic place.

“How are the seals?

Do they still lie on the black rocks on the white sands?” And the sun, sinking slowly from the wide, naming sky, leaving on the horizon a searing line of red for one moment as it slipped into the Atlantic waters. And the waves, no longer roughly beaten copper, but suddenly dark and cold as lead, with fading purple lights … And as you turned back to the village, the west wind behind you, the taste of salt spray still on your lips, the last gulls silenced in the darkness, there was the low moon rising over the red cliffs of Loch Innish to welcome you. And the arm of the sea, flung round the island, was silvered and black.