The Heat of the Day (18 page)

but wherever could that have been? What a pity, because you never saw him at that age.--Oh," she exclaimed, for the first time looking critically at the space between the chair and the sofa, "and there is no tea: I knew something was wrong!" "I expect it will come." "Poor Mrs. Tringsby," Cousin Nettie explained, "sometimes does not know what time it is unless she looks at the clock. Shall we," she asked, looking con-spiratorially at Roderick, "ring the bell?" "You don't think that would simply bring her rushing upstairs?" "Yes, it would be better for her to take a nice rest. Shall we wait and see whether tea comes?" "At any age he was, I never knew my father. I mean, I did as a baby, but they don't count. I think I hardly should know him if I saw him--saw his photograph. Did you know him well?" "Oh, yes," she said, so much surprised by the question that she seemed perturbed. "Victor? I thought everybody knew that. I was the last to see him: we both had tea in a shop." "What, before he died?" "Not died, exactly; before he left your mother." "Oh no, Cousin Nettie; I'm afraid she left him." "Why afraid? How can one be afraid of what _has__ happened? That is one great advantage for me." "I mean, afraid for her sake: it was a pity because of what everybody thought. She never is unkind, I happen to know, but it did apparently look like that--her leaving him." "She couldn't leave someone who wasn't there." "Not where--my father? Where do you mean he was?" "Unfortunately I cannot remember where his nurse lived. She had her own little house, and he said it was very nice." "His _old__ nurse?" said Roderick, wrinkling up his forehead. "Well, she may have been older than Victor, possibly. She had been the one who nursed him during the war. That was why he asked me to have tea in the shop. 'I cannot hope to _explain__ what I am doing to anybody,' he said. 'So I thought I would like to talk about it to you.' I said, 'Because I am as odd as what you are doing?' and he said, 'That must be what it amounts to.' I said, 'Well, Victor, they will think us both very odd now.' There was a plate of little pink sugar cakes, so pretcy, just back again after all that war. I was so sorry to see him so upset that I thought I had better just eat toast. But then he said, 'If _you__ cannot eat those cakes I shall know I really am doing something terrible.' So I know I ate three. And now," finished Cousin Nettie, looking reproachfully though without a tremor at Roderick's uniform, "again there are no more cakes like that." "But what could he mean by 'terrible'?" "I knew just what he meant. It did not look well. I believe," added Cousin Nettie, lowering her voice, "she was quite common." At this point, tea made an entrance seldom more inopportune. The parlourmaid, having lodged the equipage on the bureau, raked forward a three-legged table, which she placed in exactly the vacuum at which Cousin Nettie had stared. On the table she plonked down the tray, which was small enough to have required stacking with considerable art: she steadied a toppling pyramid of china and said, "There, dear." "Thank you, Hilda." "Sandwiches today, for the gentleman." "How thoughtful--please thank Mrs. Tringsby.... Mrs. Tringsby _is__ thoughtful," said Cousin Nettie, when Hilda had gone out and shut the door. "One has to think of her feelings; but then one has to think of everyone's feelings and she is a good soul. Many people now would like to be here, but she has never made me feel she wished I was anybody else. She understands that this is my place, so she will never take away my room. So we must not upset her." "No, Cousin Nettie, no.--But what about my father and his nurse?" "Oh, _that__ was not nearly enough!" she exclaimed with a touch of zest. "She had been his nurse already, but he wanted her this time to be his wife." "But there was my mother." "I know, I know," agreed Cousin Nettie. "No wonder he felt he was doing something odd." "So then, that was the reason they were divorced?" Conditioned to be unable to ignore food, Roderick had taken and bitten into a sandwich; he now looked at it as though unable to recognise the marks of his own teeth. "--I suppose?" "I'm afraid I don't know what happened after that," said she, occupied in unstacking the cups and giving the spoons little arranging touches in the saucers. "Nobody ever told me, I don't think; and as nobody ever asked me, either, I did not tell them. It was just at that time that I was becoming odder. For so long they had said, 'If you keep on not going back to Mount Morris when Francis asks you to and everybody thinks you should, people will come to the conclusion that you are odd.' So at last I said, 'Then that must be what I am.' Because once that came to be known, nothing more could be expected, could it? So they said in that case I ought not to go on living in hotels, even quietly, even in private ones. If I was well enough to be in the hotels, then I was well enough to go back to Mount Morris. So I then said, 'Very well, then, perhaps I had better go into a home.' There seemed to be nowhere for me but here or there.--Oh, are you _not__ eating the sandwiches?" she finished, looking from them to him in distress. "You can't remember anything more my father said?" "He said what he was doing was for the best.... You see, if you do not finish up the sandwiches I might be like him when he thought I was not going to finish up the cakes; I might think 7 was doing something terrible." But she did not think so: she replaced the lid on the teapot, which she had refilled, with the contenting touch of someone practising her craft. "Yes, I had tea with him; and now here I am having tea with you!--Am I really to call you Roderick?" "Yes: why don't you?" "Roderick..." Roderick paused, in deference to the moment, but when it was over shifted all the more eagerly in his chair. "He said to you, what he was doing was for the best?" "Oh, yes--all my cousins make decisions; I have been used to that all my life. First they looked at one thing, then they looked at the other. It was only for me that there was nothing to do but what I did. I expect, as you are my cousin, _you__ make decisions?" "Just now I'm in the Army." "But you decided to come and see me." "Because what I _have__ decided is, to live at Mount Morris." "Oh, but my cousin decided that for you." "I wanted, first, to be certain you would not mind." "That was why Victor asked me to have tea in the shop." "I never," Roderick said, with a heaviness only just modified by his youth, "knew what you've just told me." Cousin Nettie, putting her cup down, glanced over her shoulder out of the window: had it occurred to her that the outlook might have changed? "So then," Roderick went on, "it was my father who asked my mother if he might go? I always thought it was the other way round. At least, that seemed to be what everyone did think, though I must say if they thought so they didn't say so: nobody has ever said anything at all to me, least of all her. Not that I suppose by _this__ time anyone cares--unless she does? If I had even wondered I could have asked; but of course what one takes for granted one leaves alone. In a way perhaps my mother is rather shy." "Or perhaps it hurt her feelings?" said Cousin Nettie. "It may have had an influence on her life," said Roderick, looking at Cousin Nettie a shade severely. "It was after tea in the shop," she went on, "that I got so much odder, and also poor Victor died. So I shouldn't wonder if nobody knew. How strange." "But what about the nurse?" "I'm afraid she was a little common." "Yes, but is she alive?" "I don't know who is alive. But what story _is__ true? Such a pity, I sometimes think, that there should have to be any stories. We might have been happy the way we were." "Something has got to become of everybody, I suppose, Cousin Nettie." "No, I don't see why. Nothing has become of me: here I am, and you can't make any more stories out of that. That is why I am only in half-mourning." She ran a finger down black piping to rest on a black bow, then asked, without looking up: "So why are you looking at me like that?" By automatically holding his cup out for more tea, Roderick must have tugged at Cousin Nettie's attention; actually he had been looking at nothing _but__ her for some time. His eyes had not wavered from the sky-framed face of his Cousin Francis's cousin-widow; and that she had been aware of this, with however great unconcern, had been an element in their talk. In fact, if she had shown authentic oddness, it was in being as much unmoved by Roderick as she seemed to be. For his part, he was not now wondering how to run the blockade, he was wondering how not to show he _had__ run it--obviously it did not do to tax her with being a _malade imaginaire__ when she had, as she had so disarmingly told him, adopted the one possible course. There had not been a touch of hysteria about this: on the contrary, it had been policy--Hamlet had got away with it; why should not she? But there had been doubts about Hamlet. Roderick understood; and, as for Cousin Nettie, could anybody who voluntarily espoused Wisteria Lodge be _quite__ normal?--but then again, normal: what was that? She carried with her--in her propriety with him, in her entire manner--the lasting dignity of a world in which it was impossible to say, "Oh, come off it!" Nor could Stella's son have ever been so direct; though Victor's son might be itching to have the matter out. The sidelong glitter of reason, the uncanny hint of sanity about this afternoon's conversation at once frenzied Roderick and seduced him. One could argue, she had chosen well. Here in this room her own existence could be felt condensing round her in pure drops; inside this closed window was such a silence as the world would probably never hear again--for when war did stop there would be something more: drills right through the earth, planes all through the sky, voices keyed up and up. The air would sound; the summer-humming forest would be torn. _Here__ was nothing to trouble her but the possibility of being within reach: seated on the sofa with her back to what she had ascertained to be nothing, Cousin Nettie was well placed. "All the same, Cousin Nettie," said Roderick, "you could be fairly quiet, as far as that goes, at Mount Morris--/ am not asking you to come back," he threw in hastily. "All I am saying is, I shall consider the house as much yours as mine." "Consider it anything you like; that is half the fun!" She moved back on the sofa, bringing tea to an end by forgetting it, and began to hunt through the coloured wools beside her. "Look," she said, holding up a skein, "now I am going to begin to embroider a purple rose. What do you say to that?" "I don't know. I should have thought, pink?" "Ah, but there is no more pink wool, and there _are__ purple roses. Nobody believes me, but I could lead you to the very place in the garden and show you the bush. There is only one; it's not my fault if there are no others in the world; there is one at Mount Morris--an old Persian rose, only ever blooming for a week, and no sooner are they open than they die. So you must look for them at the right time." "There are other things I should have liked to have asked you about Mount Morris." Cousin Nettie, leaning across the table, lightly tapped the arm of Roderick's chair. She said, as lightly: "Let sleeping dogs lie!" "And about my father.... Actually," he went on in a more resolute voice, "7 have never been there." "Indeed?" she remarked, with a curious drop of interest, vaguely threading a needle for the rose, "then what a surprise is in store for you. Not what you expect." "Probably nothing ever is quite that. But it is bound to be something." "Oh, there will be no difficulty about its being _something__; it always has been; that always has been the trouble." Having completed her first purple stitch, she turned once more towards him her seeing eyes. "Of course there's this to be considered--you're a man. So you may keep going, going, going and not notice--I have seen that to be almost so with one man, although not alas quite. I wonder whether you will guess whom I mean?--Francis. He did not quite succeed. Day after day for me was like sinking further down a well--it became too much for me, but how could I say so? You see I could not help seeing what was the matter--what he had wanted me to be was his wife; I tried this, that and the other, till the result was that I fell into such a terrible melancholy that I only had to think of anything for _it__ to go wrong, too. Nature hated us; that was a most dangerous position to build a house in--once the fields noticed me with him, the harvests began failing; so I took to going nowhere but up and down stairs, till I met my own ghost. Never anything to be frightened of in the garden--but that has all run wild now, I daresay." "Mother (who had just come back from there) didn't say so. Of course, it was not the time of year for flowers.... She was delighted with the drawingroom." "Visitors were always delighted with the drawing-room--Why are you getting up, Roderick?" "Because I must be going now, I'm afraid." "I have not called you Victor by mistake?--I have not upset you?" "No: I hope I haven't upset _you__?--It's simply that I have got to catch my train." "Oh, a train. To London?" "And then another train, on.--Well, Cousin Nettie," he said, hesitatingly standing beside the sofa, "cheer up." "I am sorry to say I am very cheerful, now.--Did you say your mother is still alive?" "Oh, yes." "Then please remember me to her; it was only by chance that we did not meet. Goodbye Roderick. I hope you enjoyed your tea?" "Yes, thank you, it was excellent. And I have enjoyed myself very much. Would you like me to come again?" "Oh... Well, perhaps some day. We must wait and see." Roderick saw that now he had reminded her of elsewhere by his declared intention of going there, Cousin Nettie could hardly endure his presence a minute longer. From the threshold he looked back: down the length of the room she sent him a last glance which might have been the first--conspiratorial, full of things to say, in a moment, when somebody should be gone. They were back again where they had started: he might have just arrived. He shut the door behind him, crept down the stairs--no lover's exit could have been more discreet. He got himself past the drawingroom without further interference from Mrs. Tringsby, whom he saw no reason to thank. Having emerged from the cosy white-pillared porch, he threw another last look back: it seemed to him that Wisteria Lodge had weakened and faded inside the grip of the climbing plant. As against which, the indomitable surrounding wall loomed higher. Roderick heard again that same indecisive step: a man in a muffler, trailing a croquet mallet, came round the corner of the house and stood contemplating the visitor as the latter unlatched the gate to