The Heat of the Day (17 page)

present worked as a thinning of the membrane between the this and the that, it was a becoming apparent--but then, what else is love? No, there is no such thing as being alone together. Daylight moves round the walls; night rings the changes of its intensity; everything is on its way to somewhere else--there is the presence of movement, that third presence, however still, however unheeding in their trance two may try to stay. Unceasingly something is at its work. Even, each beat of the other beloved heart is one beat nearer the destination, unknowable, towards which that heart is beating its way; under what compulsion, what?--to love is to be unescapably conscious of the question. To have turned away from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face with everything. Stella slid Robert's cup towards him slowly across the table, saying: "Oh, and one evening I went into the drawingroom there." "And what was it like?" "Just like a drawingroom--I had almost forgotten. I imagined Roderick's wife in it one day: why not, after all? But there was a picture of the _Titanic__ hanging in one corner." "I don't imagine," he said, bent on some other thought, "that that would worry a girl." "It was more that I--" But he cut in--"Stella..." "Yes?" "Talking of that, why should we not marry?" Up went her eyebrows. "Talking of the _Titanic__?" "No, no--talking of Roderick. If anyone is to many, why not us?" "You and I?" "Put it that way," said Robert with pardonable irony. "Anyway, why not?" She drew a very deep breath, as though possibly the answer lay somewhere at the. bottom of her lungs. "We have got into the way of not marrying, I suppose. It would be such a business, Robert; I can't imagine it. There doesn't seem to be much to marry for, at the moment, does there? Why not wait till we see what's going to happen next? We always have." "Yes, I know; but what _I__ am saying--" "--Yes, I know; but all that would have to drag up so much." "I can't see why; and I cannot really see what.... You think I am being very conventional this evening?" "Roderick would like it," she reflected, with an elbow on the table, supporting her temple on her hand, obliquely following with her eyes a scroll in the damask pattern of the cloth. "At least, I'd imagine so; wouldn't you? Anyhow, I realised at Mount Morris that he really could not go on and on having a disreputable mother. And he has such a feeling for family, he would like everyone to be in it, including you. Not that I've ever asked what he thinks of you, because that would be to ask what he thinks of us. By now, I hardly know what he thinks of anything; but in principle, I'm certain, he'd be all for this. So it's not _that__...." "Well, then?" "Considering everything," she said, narrowing her eyes at this first allusion to the unhappy talk in the car, "this _is__ very nice of you, my darling--to ask me to marry you." "Surely I often have?" "No, I don't think so; not really; not so point-blank. We have only talked about it the way we've talked about everything." She thought carefully. "This _is__ the first time, I know--in a way I wish you hadn't chosen tonight." "Why not? There's nothing wrong with it now. Anything one must say, one must say as soon as one can. One cannot time feeling--at least, as you know, I can't: I suppose that's where to women most men seem to blunder. No, you must face it: all along the line I'm not half so clever as you seem to have thought--or half-thought? The reason I want to marry you is that I want to marry you--I can't put up anything better, if that's not enough. This came over me while you've been away, and I can't wait to bring it out now you're back. I know you're tired--but there you are. The fact is I cannot bear you out of my sight." "But I hardly ever am." "I don't know--aren't you? I'm not so sure as I used to be about that." "You think I run into trouble?" she hazarded, glancing at her nails. "Well, you do seem, don't you," he mildly said, "to spin yourself up into rather peculiar mare's-nests?" "Then I need looking after?" "Your friend What's-his-name must have thought so. If he thinks you should be more careful whom you take up with, so do I." "'What's-his-name'?" she said edgily. "You mean Harrison? It is an easy name to remember." "Harrison, then.... How if I, Stella, need looking after, too? It shook me, just now in the car, when you calmly said that where I, my life, was concerned anything, for all _you__ knew, might be possible." " '_Calmly?--__Oh, never, Robert!" "Well, at any rate _said__. After two years, what an enormity!" "I do see it was." "How little you have been content to know.... Or have you and I never quite been our ages?" She bowed her head and said: "I thought it had all been perfect." He said: "Yes, it's all seemed perfect,"--but at the same time slowly turned his head to look into one of the dusky distances of the restaurant. "But as you," he went on, "must have begun to see two months ago, and as I saw when you came out with all that tonight, all the time there must have been a catch in it somewhere. We must have been about due to take this knock." Now, with an effect of deliberation, he fixed his eyes on her face--though somehow not, it appeared, on _her__. Nor did those eyes appear to her to be his--they were black-blue, anarchical, foreign. "I'd really rather now," he said, "have things a little less perfect, if necessary. All that can cost too much--lovely, yes; but there has never been any question of faith. When it was a question of that, you were paralysed. How am I to know what more reservations you may not still have in your mind? _I__ see only one way of knowing.--Are you going to marry me?" "Robert, that's simply forcing things!" "Then you don't want to? On the whole, you think, better not?" She replied: "Have you given me time to think at all?" "Oh?" he said quickly, checked--but at the same time reassured or mollified. He made a less frozen movement and blinked his eyes shut: when they reopened they were at least familiar. "Haven't I?" he asked, in a youthful uncertain tone. "Is _that__ all?... But it's not such a new idea, or a wild one?" "You've made it sound wild," she said, with brimming-over reproach, "Robert, browbeating me and contradicting yourself. I may not have been sure where I was, but now I certainly don't know where I am. First you say, you'd made up your mind while I was in Ireland to ask me to marry you, anyhow, when I came back; _then__ you say, you feel forced to ask me because of something I said just now in the car--partly because it suddenly seems to you necessary to keep me under your eye, partly because you feel I really do owe some balm to your offended honour. I can't help it, darling, that's how you make it sound--that the very least I can do is marry you, to prove to you I'm convinced that anything more I might possibly hear about you can't be true. Any of my own reasons to hesitate, to be in two minds, have got to go by the board? Nothing that's ever counted counts, then? What is this,--an emergency?" He said, askance: "What a tongue you have!" "Have I?" said Stella, taken aback. "It does seem odd to be talking like this to you." "Yes, I would rather you talked like that to Harri-son." "Forgive me.--But what _did__ you really mean?" He could hardly be blamed for sighing. "It seemed to me," he said, "I was clear enough. I asked you to marry me. Perhaps I was incoherent--but do, though, get this straight: my having told you I wanted to marry you had not the remotest connection with anything you've said. If it hadn't been so dreary in that car I'd have asked you then. In fact, I started out for the station so charged up that if it hadn't been for Ernie sitting there waiting for us I'd have asked you the instant I saw you on the platform. Even, it may have been some confused new feeling I'd started having about you which made me let Ernestine string along--after all, she's my sister.... No, I don't say that what came up after we'd dropped her had _no__ effect on me: it did have this one--to make me more certain it was time we married. The idea of anybody who liked coming along and frightening you is appalling, Stella.--Yes, I _was__ hurt, too: how could I hide that? You know you see right through me. How could I not be hurt? For a moment the whole of love seemed futile if it couldn't keep you from--from that fantastic thing." "I saw it was fantastic." "Still, you were frightened?" "It was only that I--" "Yes, I thought you were frightened," said Robert, leaning back from the table as though to get the whole thing into farewell perspective. "For me--but also of me, a little bit?" "It was simply that I--" "Perfect love," he said reflectively, "casts out fear.--No, forget that, though: naturally that's impossible.--You love me?" Eloquently she answered nothing whatever, not even looking up. "We're keeping the waiter waiting," she added after a moment. "Where?" said Robert, looking at the bill, which had been for some time unobtrusively at his elbow, then putting notes on the plate. "Although," she said, "you still are wrong about one thing: not just 'anybody' could frighten me.--I do wish you'd find out who Harrison _is__." "Ask my spies? By all means--but is he anybody?"

Chapter 11

Dearest Mother,

It was a pity we had not more time the other day, though it was nice that you came at all. It was extraordinary how much about there you had managed to notice; as you may guess I have not stopped thinking about it ever since, with a few interruptions. It was almost as if I had really at last been there, though not of course quite. I have remembered various things I had meant to ask you, also I think there were one or two things I did say which perhaps you did not quite take in. I don't think, for instance, you yet quite grasp how much it is on my mind about Cousin Nettie and that I really should do something about her. She may well feel she has had rather a bad deal. From what I can make out from what you say she has not ever been more than slightly off, and after all Mount Morris was once her home. How would you feel if you suddenly wanted to go back to a place, then found it had been given to someone else? One thing you cannot be blamed for not knowing, because I decided I would not tell you until I saw what your attitude to the whole thing was, (and owing to the short time we had and there being so much to say I don't know that yet) is, that just before you went off to Ireland I wrote to the Wisteria Lodge people to inquire how Cousin Nettie was and whether she does know Cousin Francis is dead. Their reply I must say struck me as somewhat stuffy, and Fred agreed. They wrote ambiguously about Heaven and everything now seeming beautiful to Cousin Nettie. As far as any plain statement was concerned the letter might have been written by one of their patients, though it was signed Iolanthe Tringsby. She took up a thinly veiled "anyhow, what the hell is that to you?" attitude which I did resent. Would you or someone mind sending her a line explaining that after all I am now the head of the family? I do not see how I can explain that myself without sounding self-important, but it would be simpler if she grasped it. Fred took an if anything still more dim view than I did, and said were we certain the Tringsbys were not fishy? All I could reply to that was to quote you and say their position was delicate. The fact remains that there Cousin Nettie is, and that I hope to arrange to see her as soon as possible. About this I intend to take up a firm line, and I do hope, Mother, you will support me. I shall apply for the pass I did not have the chance to apply for for Cousin Francis's funeral, saying that a close relative for whom I am responsible has now had a mental breakdown and I must cope. I can work out trains to get there and back in a day. If you took in more than I thought you seemed to when I brought up this Cousin Nettie problem the other day, excuse me for bringing it up again. All I don't want is to take this important step without telling you. You see, the more you tell me about Mount Morris, the more I feel I have inherited Cousin Nettie with the place. It is all very well to say she hates it and would go mad completely if she had to go back, but how can one tell? I really must see her and have her good will. It would spoil everything if I was an usurper. Even here we are quite impressed by the news from Egypt. How particularly gratified Donovan must be, except that I now look unlikely to be a general. But at this rate it really does look as though I might be at Mount Morris quite soon. I suppose if I were one of my uncles I should be disappointed at the idea of the war being over before I had seen fighting or even got a commission, but under the circumstances what can you expect? Though I must say I should like to be known as "the Captain" when I live there. Fred points out that it may still be necessary to invade Europe. Fred asks to be remembered, and says he much enjoyed his glimpse of you the other day. He congratulated me on your being so young-looking. I hope you did not get back too tired and late? I'm sorry too there was not time for me to hear more about you, apart from Mount Morris. So I am all the more looking forward to a letter next time you have time. Try not to work too hard, and avoid worries. If you don't want to embroil yourself in this Wisteria Lodge thing, don't. But I thought I ought, and of course I wanted to tell you.

Much love from

Roderick.

P.S. Exactly how many acres did you say are to go under tillage this year? Also I forgot to ask you if there is a gun room, and if so what approximately would be its contents? Or under present regulations are there none?

Some days after the dispatch of this letter, Roderick rang the front door bell of Wisteria Lodge. His air was expectant, but at the same time mild and accommodating. As he stood, house and garden vibrated: unseen a lorry went by on the road side of the high garden wall. Otherwise everything was silence; the wisteria framed the white-pillared porch and the bay windows in its hoary powerful arabesques. This powerhouse of nothingness, hive of lives in abeyance, seemed to Roderick no more peculiar than any other abode. The brass surround of the electric bell was blondely polished, and so seldom had he the pleasure of ringing bells that he was on the point of placing his thumb on the push again when the door opened: a parlourmaid looked at him. Convincingly got up as parlourmaids used to be, she completed the old-time illusion of the façade. The maid had not finished asking whom he wanted when an askance lady took form at the end of the hall. She exclaimed: "Oh dear!" resignedly, later adding, "good afternoon...?" "Good afternoon," said Roderick eagerly. "I am Mrs. Tringsby. You are not Mr. Rodney?" "Oh yes I am." "Oh dear," said Mrs. Tringsby again: "I had been expecting you to be rather older and not quite so early. However, do by all means come into the drawingroom." She made a lunge at a door. "Oh.--Is my cousin in there?" "No, oh dear no, no: she likes to be cosy up in her room. _We__ love her sitting anywhere that she likes. Much absorbed in the woolwork when I peeped in just now. She knows she is going to have a treat of some kind today, but we may find she has forgotten what. I _should__ like one word with you first, if you don't mind." "Then I can go up?--Right." He held the door open; she loped through it ahead of him, afterwards turning round with a conspiratorial sign that it must be shut. In the drawingroom, Roderick stood looking questioningly, with candour and tolerance, at Mrs. Tringsby, while she, like somebody dressing in a hurry, assembled a blended expression to meet his. "You musn't of course think we have been making difficulties," she said. "But only remember what happened last time!" "Last time?" "Last time she had a visitor." "But that was not me." "Such a dreadful shock for us all!" "Yes, I know; I'm sorry. In fact I'm sure Cousin Francis would want me to apologise." "But you see he should never, never, never have come in that state! What _were__ his doctors thinking of?" "I don't know.--Cousin Nettie does know he's dead?" "_This__ dear room," went on Mrs. Tringsby, casting her eyes around and withdrawing them with repugnance from one sofa, "will to me, I suppose, never never quite feel the same again. But of course, it was others I had to think of!" "Well, we were all very sorry. However, that sort of thing doesn't happen twice. The Army could tell you, _I'm__ as sound as a bell, or they wouldn't have been as keen as they were on having me." But she went on with even greater despondency: "Yes, that's another thing--I mean, your coming down here in uniform. Here, we are so careful not to have dreadful thoughts; we quite live, you see, in a little world of our own. You won't, you won't on any account," added Mrs. Tringsby, glancing shrinkingly at Roderick's battle dress, "talk to poor Mrs. Morris about the war, will you?" "I don't know anything about it," said Roderick, his whole impatient interest by now directed upon the door. "Though, look here, Mrs. Tringsby," he said, on an afterthought, for an instant turning, "I saw troops swarming all the way along from the station here. How can you stop your people spotting them out of the top windows? Not to speak of lorries." "Oh, but those are not relatives." "Oh.--Well, is there anything else? I've not got much time, you see: I'm only out on a pass." "In any case, you must not, better not, stay too long." "I didn't mean to," he said, with unconscious hauteur. "Just a little, light chat. _Never__, of course, the past." "No; what I want to talk about is the future." "Oh _dear__.... And lately she has been so much her-self." Mrs. Tringsby, inflated by a foreboding sigh, rose, and like something under remote control was propelled by Roderick's will power to the threshold. "Or, you wouldn't like me to stay with you?" she said hopefully. "She and I could chat; you could look on and, so much more easily, judge how you think she seems.... For one thing, how if she does not know who you are?" "Mrs. Tringsby, I relied on you to tell her." "Oh, I _told__ her; but--" "We can see, then.--Now, please, can't we go up?" Upstairs, at the end of a passage, Mrs. Tringsby tattooed on a door, opened just enough of it to glide her head round, and sang out: "Here we are!" "Then, come in," argued a voice. Mrs. Tringsby glanced at Roderick, to warn him not to think it would all be as simple as this. She cleared her throat and continued: "A nice young man to see you." "But I was expecting Victor Rodney's son. Has he not come?" "But of course he has, dear!" "Then, can he not come in?" Roderick, asking himself why he had never thought of bringing Cousin Nettie a bunch of flowers, advanced into her room. From where she sat, on a sofa drawn across the window, she sent him a look which at once established that he and she could afford to wait to speak. Returning to her needlework she executed two or three stitches more, waiting for Mrs. Tringsby to go. Mrs. Trinsgby, picking up by its frill the cushion of an armchair facing the sofa, shook out the cushion, seemed constrained to pause to admire it--as though it once again struck her, and should not fail to strike Roderick, that every object in Wisteria Lodge was of the very best--and invited him to be seated. He remained standing. Mrs. Tringsby consoled herself by indicating, in dumb-show, the position of the bell. "I shall be just downstairs, _just__ down there in the drawingroom," she said in a significant voice. "Thank you, Mrs. Tringsby," said Cousin Nettie. When Mrs. Tringsby _had__ gone, Roderick sat down in the armchair. Reaching out, he picked up a skein of coloured wool from the floor and replaced it on the sofa by Cousin Nettie. Sideways, he studied the square of canvas on which she was at work: the design, very possibly not of her choosing, had been machine-stamped on in lines of blue; one rose and about a quarter of the background had been by now stitched in. Cousin Nettie, though she did not look up, could be felt to check the instinctive, secretive movement with which she twitched the canvas towards herself--repenting, she held it up by the corners to full view. "I expect," she said, "you would never have the patience to do this?" "No, I expect not." "But you must _have__ patience, to have come such a journey. It's a long way to here." "Not so very; not from where I came from." "I thought it was," she said, for the first time troubled. "Too far for anybody to come. You are looking out of the window; you can see for yourself." He had been looking past her, out of the window. A distance of fields, woods and diluted November sky did indeed stretch without any other feature: sky and earth at last exhaustedly met--there was no impact, no mystery, no horizon, simply a nothing more. This was a window at the back of a house at the edge of a town; Roderick recollected that Cousin Nettie had not for years now looked out of any other. And years ago she must have ceased to look out of this, for today she sat with her back to it with finality. What she liked must be this extreme end of the room, light on her work or the unassailing sensation of having nothing but nothing behind her back. Across the sky over her head ran the bolted window-sash: this timeless colourless afternoon silhouetted the upper part of her figure, her rolled up soft hair, the delicate projections of her face. From a ring on the hand methodically thrusting the needle into the canvas, drawing it out again, an opal alternated its milk and fire. From her left hand the wedding ring was gone. She marvelled: "So you remembered me though you never met me? Are you called Victor too?" "No, Roderick." "Then shall I call you Roderick, Roderick?" she said flutteringly. "I heard of you as a baby, but now you are quite a man." "I believe I was called after some ancestor--you might know?" "There have been too many ancestors, I'm sorry to say. We are so mixed up by this time that it's a wonder we are anything at all. I am so glad you are not called Victor--poor Victor: really that was expecting too much of anyone!" "I shall call my son, whenever I have one, Francis." "Oh, he _would__ be so pleased!" exclaimed Cousin Nettie, for the first time looking rather than glancing at her visitor. "What a pity he's dead." It was a fleeting yet dwelling look, timidly momentary in intention but then prolonged. The fading of her pale grey eyes to a paler lightness had made even the pupils seem half extinct; there could be felt, as she kept her gaze on Roderick, a tender quivering too deflectable ray of humanity--nothing was strange in those eyes but their apprehension of strangeness. All Cousin Nettie's life it must have been impossible for her to look at the surface only, to see nothing more than she should. These were the eyes of an often-rebuked clairvoyante, wide once more with the fear of once more divining what should remain hidden--"And yet," they seemed to be protesting, "I cannot help it, so what am I to do?" It was to happen, this afternoon, that her look met its younger, not yet unsteadied counterpart in Roderick's. "It's because he's dead," he said eagerly, "that I've come. They all seemed to think that I should upset you. I hope not?" "I hope I shan't upset _you__," returned Cousin Nettie, lowering her ugly embroidery as though it had up to now been some sort of guard or feint. "I believe I am very odd.--And you must not," she said with a gesture, "tell me I'm not, or I shall begin to wonder." "Do you know Cousin Francis has left Mount Morris to me?" "Mount Morris," she said, "poor unfortunate house, poor thing! So there it is, after all this time; and here I am! So you see I am only in half-mourning," she added, glancing down at the breast of her mottled dress with the black pipings. "Mourning for a cousin--he was my cousin, you know. There should have never never been any other story. I cannot blame him, and I am trying not to blame myself, and you must not blame me." "Cousin Nettie, he has left me Mount Morris." She looked at him fixedly, halted, fingers to her lips. "I wanted to ask--" "--No, no," she interrupted, "_you__ must not ask me, no!" "You mind my asking you if you mind?" said Roderick, experiencing his first moment of uncertain faith. "I thought," she said, still in agitation, "it had all begun again. _You__ now, now that you are the master. No, I cannot come back; I told him, again and again, and I told them--now I am telling you. Everywhere is better without me, so of all places I will not go back there. You must make the best of Mount Morris as it is." "I don't especially want anybody to do anything," said Roderick. "Oh, but you brood about what they should be doing. Whenever you remember you are unforgiving." "But," said Roderick, having taken thought, "I don't really think I'm like that." "_I__ know, because I never have been forgiven. You should be like that: what is to become of us wrong ones if there's to be nobody who is right?" "Well," he could only say, "I'm not like that." "No, not like him," she decided, lightly shaking her head. "Oh, I wish you could have seen him when he was a young man, when he was my cousin. Head and shoulders above all the rest of them, full of schemes and life! Who knows what might not have come of a different story, if there could have been one. As it was, he had to go out looking for a son." Roderick, inevitably hurt, was on the point of exclaiming: "Do you think he chose so badly?" but decided not to allow himself the remark. Cousin Nettie, in giving him her confidence, had no more than uttered, with a fatalistic uninflected lightness, the commonplaces of her thought. It had been to be seen, all along the line, how she charged herself with keeping the conversation within bounds. Once more she picked up her woolwork, with a conventional sigh--though this time only to turn the canvas from front to back, examine her stitches closely, then hold out the whole at arm's length for a look in which showed absolute disconnection, as though the secret or charm of the continuity had been lost now, and she for one did not care. But no, she dare not afford _that__--she at once set out, with stork's-beak scissors, sedulously to snip off straggles of wool from the rough side. But the scissors, out of some impish volition of their own, kept returning to peck, pick, hover destructively over the finished part. So she disengaged herself from them in a hurry, dropping them in her lap. Underneath the window, a hesitating step could be heard on a gravel path. Roderick did not want there to be a pause because he did not want there to seem to have been a crisis. He looked about the room, searching for something on which to comment. On no account was he willing to change the subject, but there might be no harm in a fresh approach. Mrs. Tringsby's original choice of pictures, of a rural innocuous kind, had been supplemented by quite a little gallery of Cousin Nettie's, which were in a somehow more singular key--postcards of electrically blue foreign lakes, moonlight falling livid on the Alps, gargoyles silhouetted against a streaked sky, a chamois in balance at which one caught one's breath. Also there was a bevy of tinted pictures of children; all, it seemed, engaged innocently in some act of destruction--depetalling daisies, puffing at dandelion clocks, trampling primrose woods, rioting round in fragile feathered grown-up hats, intercepting fairies in full flight, or knocking down apples from the bough. Only their neutralising prettiness could have got these pictures past Mrs. or at any rate Dr. Tringsby's eye. Their unweightiness--for they were all unframed, at the most being pasted on to cardboard--permitted of their being strung on wool from different projections about the room: evidently no pins were allowed in walls. Among them, Roderick noted, appeared not one single photograph: being himself, he could not not remark on this. "I was wondering if you'd have a photograph of Mount Morris." "Oh, no; they are so dark-looking. And why should I want a picture of anything I have seen? Don't _you__ think," she said, "it is a little odd that they could expect anyone to be so forgetful?" "People do like to be reminded, don't they, though? Everybody I know in the Army carries photographs round. They show them: but I suppose they look at them too." "I know I had a photograph of Victor," said Cousin Nettie, concentrating upon Roderick, eyes wide open. "He was just a schoolboy, but he sent it himself; so I am sure I would have put it away _somewhere__;