Homing (28 page)

“Tracy, I’m wrong to let you entertain any such ideas—my life is here, my roots are very deep, I must do first what comes to hand
here
—”

“And mine is just one more demand,” he said gently.

“Oh, no, it’s
good
to be needed!” she cried involuntarily. “Don’t think you aren’t tempting me, Tracy, because you are! Just the thought of some one like you
back
of me, bigger than I
am—” She broke off, keeping her eyes on her hands. “You see, I’ve thought of you too,” she confessed.

“Then please go on thinking of me. Think hard. Think fast. There is so little time.”

“When—when must I decide?”

“You can decide any time. But it will probably be several weeks before I sail.”

“
Weeks!
” she cried in despair. “Oh, no, I can’t think of it—it’s impossible—”

“You could always follow me. We probably couldn’t travel together anyway, they always fly me,” he said simply, but his hands were knotted now, and there was a tense little muscle working in his jaw. “You may think I’m a bit cool about this thing,” he said with difficulty. “How else can I be, with an open door behind you and the clocks striking tea time? But never doubt, my darling, that I want you in my arms. You gave
yourself
away just now when you said that about somebody bigger than you are. You have gone it alone long enough.”

“I’m anything but alone,” she began to protest, and Melchett came in with the tea tray, and cups for nine.

Tracy stood up, towering, and his smile was casual and kind.

“I promised to turn up at Cleeve for tea,” he said. “And I’ve sat gossiping here all this time.” He took both her hands in his, before Melchett had left the room. “Charles has plans for
tomorrow
—you’ll hear from him. Until then—” He raised her hands to his lips, and she felt his kiss in her palms. “Think,” he said. “Think about it, please.”

When he had driven away, and no one showed up for tea, Virginia went slowly up the stairs—even in one’s own room, privacy was a casualty of the war. In order that Jeff might have a room, she must share hers with Mab. Outside the door she arranged her face, lifted her chin, and went in.

Mab sat beside the cage, offering a variety of tempting food, while Midge took no notice of her. His olive and gold feathers were rumpled and lustreless, his eyes had gone into his head.

“He’s sick,” said Mab, turning a tragic face towards the door. “He knows now that she won’t come back. What can I do—if he dies, what can I tell Jeff?”

“He may pick up after a day or two here,” Virginia said. “He needs attention. We must talk to him—make a fuss of him—play him some music.”

But Midge took no notice.

The next morning—Christmas morning—he was sitting in the bottom of the cage, apparently without strength to hold to a perch. Mab hung over him, weeping for sheer despair, coaxing, crooning, trying to tempt him with food. As Jeff had not left his room, even to see the tree, he still did not know that Midge was in the house. Late in the afternoon, Mab came to a decision. She went and knocked on his door.

“Come in,” he said, and when she opened the door he was sitting by the window in an armchair, an open book on his lap.

“Perhaps I’m doing the wrong thing,” she said, with the knob still in her hand. “Will you forgive me, if I am?”

“Naturally,” he said with a faint smile, and closed the book.

“Jeff, I know how you feel, but—I have to tell you. I’ve got Midge here. And I think he’s dying. I know it will be hard for you, but I thought if he could just hear
your
voice—I’ve tried everything else—”

He made no answer, turning his head away towards the window.

“Jeff, it’s not
fair
to him—he’s dying of loneliness—” The words broke in spite of her.

“Yes,” he said, and sighed. “You’re right, Mab. Bring him in here.”

She brought the cage, with Midge sitting motionless in the bottom.

“Hi, there,” said Jeff to Midge, in their standard greeting, to which the standard reply from Midge was “
Yike!
”
with a rising crest. But the sunken eyes, the uncared-for plumage, told their story. “Are we going to let it lick us?” Jeff asked him gently.

Midge took no notice.

“I guess we are,” said Jeff. “He’s all done, Mab.”

“Oh, Jeff,
try!
” Tears were running down her face. She opened the cage door and took Midge in her hand, trying to warm him. “He’s lighter than air,” she said. “He’s starved
himself
—even his feathers are cold—”

“He doesn’t care,” said Jeff. “We’re no good to him. We’re the wrong people. Your Noel would be the same if he lost you. Don’t cry, Mab—” He laid his good arm around her shoulders in the old, instinctive gesture. “Oh, for God’s sake don’t cry—!”

They sat together, in tears, while Sylvia’s bird died.

It was a dreadful Christmas.

And so, by dying Midge did in a way break the ice. Useless to insist that he was better off now, or to imagine that he had flown straight to Sylvia, wherever she was. There is something about a dead bird that breaks the heart entirely, and even after the soft, limp, weightless thing which had been so much joy and beauty was enclosed in an old silver jewel box of Virginia’s and laid away in a hole dug by Stephen in the rose garden, the little tragedy lingered.

Then to the family’s secret terror, Jeff got flu, and Virginia sent for Phoebe at once and they took it turnabout to watch him day and night. Jeff was not allowed to have colds, much less flu, for his rheumatic fever history made respiratory ailments a cruel hazard. The decision about going to America was taken out of her hands by Jeff’s illness, although she had almost begun to contemplate it as a possibility before Tracy returned to Town at the new year. She was tired, and lonely, and she apologized to him because for once she did not know her own mind clearly. But it was better, she told herself now, that she had not raised his hopes by going off half-cocked while he was there. Obviously, her place was still at Farthingale, and theirs was a dream, a holiday madness which had no chance of survival in the middle of a war.

Confined within the cast, Jeff was in danger of going on into pneumonia, which was likely to mean a recurrence of the old heart trouble. He knew that, as well as any of them. And lying very still in Mab’s bedroom, hot and aching and defeated, he counted his heartbeats and waited for the old stutter and lunge he had almost forgotten since his marriage to Sylvia—and
discovered
slowly to his surprise, it might almost be said to his fury, that he was not yet ready to die.

Why can’t I just let go gracefully, he thought, while his heart pumped steadily on. Midge knew how. Midge didn’t fool around, he went after her, the only way he knew. It would become me to do the same…. But in spite of himself, as it were against his will, he responded to expert care and treatment, he fought off the germ, he licked the fever, he held his heart steady, and began to mend.

“You’re going to be all right,” Virginia told him one day, beaming with relief. “You’re going to come out of this as good as new.”

“Like the damn’ fool I am,” he muttered sourly, and drew a long, cautious breath in a sigh. “Well, that just shows you, doesn’t it.”

But by the time Jeff was out of danger, Tracy had gone back to Washington, via Lisbon.
I
wish
I
could
say,
with
a
reckless
gesture,
that
if
ever
you
wanted
me
I
would
come
from
the
ends
of
the
earth,
he had written her, the night he left London.
But
I
must
put
it
the
other
way
round.
If
ever
you
will
come
to
me,
I
want
you.
She kept the letter. She read it over and over, and sometimes it blurred a little as she read. What would it be like, she wondered, and what sort of woman would she be, to lay all this down and run to him, where there were lights, and luxuries, and where she would have some one of her own, bigger than she was, as Rosalind still had Charles….

Because he was infectious, Mab had not been admitted to Jeff’s room during his illness, but more than once in the small hours Virginia had found her huddled in a dressing gown on the top stair opposite his door, her back against the banister, her eyes fixed on the line of light which showed above his threshold.

“You’ll get chilled and catch it yourself,” Virginia had scolded, but gently. “I can’t have the two of you on my hands. Run back to bed like a good girl.”

“What’s his temperature now?” Mab would ask wanly, and Virginia would tell her, sometimes knocking off a degree for luck, and out of sheer pity would give her some small errand to accomplish, make her drink a glass of port wine as a dose, and shoo her off to bed.

But as he began to improve, the logical thing was for Mab to read to him, to share his tea trays, and bring him the small gossip of the neighbourhood. Virginia noted with dismay that this did not seem to transpire. Mab was always somewhere else now. And Jeff did not ask for her.

Finally, being Virginia, she took the initiative again.

“Jeff, I think it’s time you did something about Mab,” she announced, pouring out a cup of tea for him and another for herself, at his bedside.

He took the cup from her, awkwardly still, and glanced up at her under his brows.

“So long as it doesn’t need two hands,” he said. “What should I do?”

“I don’t know.” He saw that for Virginia she was very serious indeed. “Haven’t you noticed that she isn’t visible?”

“I’m contagious.”

“Not any more.”

“You mean I must send out invitations?”

“Jeff, she’s convinced that you’d rather not see her.”

He set down his cup with a little smack, not looking at her.

“I don’t know what you have in mind yourself,” Virginia went on after a pause. “But I know that Mab has got it into her head that you will hold her to blame for Sylvia’s death.”

That brought his eyes around to her.

“How on earth does she figure that?” he asked incredulously.

“I don’t quite know how. But it’s very real to her. I hope I’m not meddling,” said Virginia warily. “But it oughtn’t to go on like this, she’s very unhappy. She seems to feel that the love she has always had for you might act as a wish to—eliminate Sylvia. It’s very complicated,” she finished faintly.

“Look, Virginia, I don’t think I feel up to this if you don’t mind, not today, couldn’t you possibly—” He met her eyes with reluctance now. “You want me to tell her that I don’t believe in voodoo?” he suggested.

She looked back at him without smiling.

“Perhaps that’s it,” she said.

“This isn’t going to come the easy way, if that’s what you’re driving at,” he said after a minute.

“No,” she agreed meekly. “Things never do, do they.” And then she thought of her own love match, in the dawn of history, when the world was young and sweet and simple, and the Germans stayed at home. “Not any more,” she qualified wistfully.

“Will she come to see me now?” he asked.

“If I say you inquired.”

“Very well, consider that I have inquired,” he sighed, and she rose.

“If I can find her,” she murmured, and went away.

After a while he opened his eyes, and Mab was standing beside him.

“Hullo,” he said, sounding to himself quite normal. “Pull up a chair.”

She did so in a silence. It was the first time either of them could remember when there had not been something to say. He reached for a cigarette and she supplied the light.

“Thank you,” said Jeff. “Well, have I missed anything, being laid up like this?”

“Bristol’s caught it again,” she said, with a glance at the radio
beside him. “And Cardiff Cathedral. You’d think God would protect His churches.”

“That’s a hard one,” he nodded, and she moved an ashtray within his reach.

Again there was a silence.

“Any local news?” he prompted, conscientiously entertaining a backward caller. “I mean—what have you been doing yourself?”

Sitting on the stairs outside your door, she might have said. Watching and praying. Waiting. Wondering. All for you. Nothing that wasn’t for you. But the words wouldn’t come. One said things like that so easily and naturally while Sylvia was alive, but now one thought first—and it wouldn’t sound right now. Everything sounded different, without Sylvia. So that one was afraid to speak. Afraid of sounding as though Sylvia wasn’t there. And groping with Jeff was a new and horrifying experience. But now one never knew what a thoughtless remark might lead to, or what blunder one might innocently commit. Confidence, and comfort, and companionship—all gone with Sylvia. Nothing left but pitfalls.

“Oh, nothing much,” she said like an awkward schoolgirl, which she had never been. “Going for walks with Noel.”

“No more Germans in the woods?”

She shook her head with a dutiful smile.

“The invasion is supposed to be off till spring,” she remarked. “Will they try again, do you think?”

“Probably.”

Another constrained silence settled between them, frightening in its implication that they no longer had common ground for easy companionship without words. Jeff’s listless attitude, his averted gaze which rested indifferently on the window, his simulated interest in her daily doings, were frightening too. She remembered a remark of Virginia’s that Jeff must get back on the horse soon. The war had thrown him, hurt him badly, but if he went on like this, withdrawn, almost insensible, he might lose forever his ability to face up to things. Besides, he was needed. Bracken was overworked and short-handed at the office.

The main raids were still passing London by, and the continued lull there, Virginia said, would give Jeff a chance to ease back into it, now that the cast had given way to a sling. But he gave them no clue to his intentions, keeping to his room, looking at them remotely, uncommunicative and ingrowing, and more and more
unlike himself. No one supposed that he was afraid to go back to London. It seemed merely that it had not occurred to him. He must have an incentive, Virginia said, mulling it over aloud. If we told him that Bracken wasn’t
able
to go on—or if we told him that Dinah must come away for a rest and he should go back to keep Bracken company—but as soon as he got there he’d find out differently. If he only had some special
reason
to pull himself together….