The Sweet Dove Died (13 page)

‘Yes, that’s the worst of it.’

‘It’s something you just have to accept – I’ve hurt people too and I’ve suffered terribly because of it, lain awake nights – oh, all that.’

‘Perhaps Leonora will understand,’James began, but Ned was bored with the subject now.

‘Gee, I’m
hungry
,’ he said, standing up and pacing about the room. ‘Let’s go out and eat.’

Leonora went to bed at eleven, determined to be ‘sensible’. She read for a little while then dropped off to sleep, the book – a large volume of Victorian memoirs – falling heavily to the floor. After some time she woke with a start – there had been a noise somewhere. James going up to his flat, surely. Or had a burglar got in and was he even now creeping up the thickly carpeted stairs? She put on her dressing-gown and slippers, opened her door and stood, listening. All was silent with the dead quiet of the middle of the night. Perhaps it
had
been James coming in; she would just tiptoe up and see if there was a light showing from his flat. But when she got there she saw that a parcel and some letters she had put there earlier still lay outside his door.

‘James?’ she called softly, but she knew that he was not there. It was three o’clock in the morning and he was with Ned. Was that better or worse than if he had been with Phoebe? she asked herself, trying to look at the situation calmly. Of course in those days when he had had his own flat she hadn’t known where he was at night. Would it perhaps have been better not to have that knowledge now?

Suddenly a piercing cry rang out. Frightened, she huddled beneath the bedclothes, until she realised that it was only one of Liz’s cats. Now she was wide awake for the second time and there seemed nothing for it but to go down and make tea, a drink she did not much like because of the comfort it was said to bring to those whom she normally despised. Yet there was something by no means disagreeable about being in bed with the electric blanket on and the tray of tea on the bedside table. She sat up, with a pleated chiffon bedjacket round her shoulders, and thought she might read a little Browning, ‘Two in the Campagna’, perhaps. The memory of its remote beauty and pleasing images comforted her, though she lacked the strength to open the book and find the poem. After a while she began to see things more steadily; had there been anyone to hear her she might have said ‘I am Leonora Eyre’, as she had at Vine Cottage. Things would be ‘better’ in the morning. She decided to say nothing to James about his not coming in. She had tried to be understanding about Phoebe; she would be even more so about Ned.

XX

James put down the telephone and returned to his study of Christie’s catalogue of porcelain to be auctioned at a forthcoming sale, but he could not concentrate. He had just told Leonora a deliberate lie, and it had been so easy. ‘Say you’ll be out of town for the weekend,’ Ned had suggested, and she had accepted it without question, just as she had accepted the other half lies he had been obliged to tell to conceal some of the practical arrangements of his new life with Ned. Of course she knew what was going on, he could sense that, and she was being deliberately ‘good’ and ‘understanding’ about it so that sometimes he almost wished she would forget her dignity for a moment and make a scene.

‘Was that Leonora?’ Humphrey asked, when James did not volunteer the information. ‘Have you told her you’ve found a new flat?’

‘She knows I’ve been looking,’ said James, ‘but I thought I’d wait until the lease was signed and all that before I said anything to her.’

‘I’m dining with her this evening. Would you like me to say a word?’

James hesitated. He would have been glad to accept his uncle’s offer as being the easiest way out, but he supposed he must face up to Leonora himself. How was he to do it?

‘Leave it to me,’ said Humphrey. He got up and began humming a popular tune of the moment. He was in good spirits these days for he was of course seeing more of Leonora than usual, and although he was too tactful to say much to her about James and his new attachment it was obvious that she was grateful to him for planning little excursions into the country, visits to historic houses, and peculiarly delicious meals to take her mind off what was happening, ‘and in her own house,’ Humphrey told himself. For James’s frequent absences must be as painful to her as if he had actually brought Ned to the flat. ‘Would you believe,’ Humphrey went on, ‘that it’s nearly a year since we met at that book sale. It seems like yesterday.’

To James it seemed a much longer time, for his year had been crowded with events and people, as the year of a man of twenty-five is likely to be in contrast with the year of a man of sixty. Leonora, Phoebe, Ned – such varied experiences – and he had loved them all, still did, in a way. But now, strangely, it was Ned who claimed all his attention in a way that the women never had.

‘You said you’d be out of town for the weekend?’ Humphrey asked.

‘Yes,’ said James shortly, for he had not yet prepared the lie for his uncle and had no idea what further explanation he could provide. Luckily none was called for; Humphrey went out, still humming his tune, and James was left alone with Miss Caton.

‘The country can be very nice in November,’ she remarked, ‘and we’ve had very mild weather lately. But I should take warm clothes with you, just in case.

James agreed politely, amused at the idea of needing warm clothes in Ned’s fiercely centrally heated flat. He returned to his work and tried to put Leonora out of his mind. He was glad that Humphrey was having dinner with her this evening. It was the thought of her alone and waiting for him that he couldn’t bear. He decided to apply Ned’s remedy: when you can’t bear to think about something, then don’t; and after a while it worked.

Humphrey was not arriving till eight o’clock and the food was all ready, but Leonora was not in the mood for Meg who had asked if she could drop in for a chat on her way home from the office. Any kind of dreary influence was to be avoided if one was to look and feel one’s best and Meg was going on about her present state of health and the difficulties experienced by women of’their’ age, not the most propitious of subjects. Tentatively at first, then with growing confidence, she described her own case – a sympathetic
woman
doctor had explained so much. Everything, it seemed, tiredness, depression, tears, feeling of inadequacy, regrets for wasted life, could be satisfactorily accounted for.

Leonora listened with mounting indignation.
She
had never been conscious of feeling inadequate, and while she could hardly deny that she too was a woman it was intolerable that she and Meg could have this in common.

‘Apparently it’s really good to interest yourself in a younger person, a sort of child substitute,’ Meg went on, ‘everyone
needs
to love. One should just let one’s love come flowing out, Dr Hirschler said’ – here Meg gesticulated with her arms – ‘not bottle it up or be ashamed of it.’

‘That might be embarrassing at times,’ Leonora observed wondering if she had given Meg too much to drink.

‘So we must all fulfil ourselves in our own way,’ Meg went on, ‘and if things seem to go wrong sometimes we mustn’t
stop
loving, that’s the point as I see it.’

Leonora wondered if she had somehow given Meg the impression that she hadn’t been seeing so much of James lately, for now Meg seemed to be almost sympathising with her, as if suggesting that James had been neglecting her in some way. Even now she could not bring herself to admit, least of all to Meg, that there was anything ‘wrong’ between her and James.

‘It was just’the same when Colin first met Harold,’ said Meg. ‘At first it was very hard for me, but now that they’re no longer together… .’

‘Really? I didn’t know that.’ Leonora’s tone brightened a shade.

‘Oh, yes – I thought I’d told you. It didn’t work out as we’d hoped.’ She made it sound almost cosy, the three of them and their hopes.

‘What happened?’

‘The usual thing. Harold met somebody at the surgery – this person brought in a poodle – or was it a Pekingese …?’ Meg frowned, trying to recall what seemed to Leonora a totally irrelevant detail, ‘a small dog, I know, some dental trouble … anyway Harold and the dog’s owner took a liking to each other and now they’ve set up house together.’

‘How convenient,’ Leonora murmured.

‘Colin was very upset, of course, but he knows he’s always got me. I’m the only person who
never
changes,’ Meg declared stoutly, and she looked it, Leonora thought, sitting there in that same old sheepskin coat which seemed to be her only winter garment. Some might have seen a touch of pathos, even nobility, in her, but not Leonora.

‘I’m sorry, Meg,’ she said, ‘but I’m going to have to turn you out. Humphrey is dining with me and he’s due at eight.’

‘You ought to marry Humphrey,’ said Meg, doing as she was told. ‘I can’t think why you’ve never married, Leonora.’

Leonora smiled enigmatically. Obviously one had had one’s chances, Meg must be well aware of that.

She saw her out, then lingered by the fruitwood mirror. It gave back the usual flattering reflection and she knew that at the candlelit dinner table she would be looking at her best in a black lace dress that Humphrey liked. Perhaps she would let him kiss her tonight. She had cooked his favourite dishes: chicken with tarragon and chocolate mousse. It was not until she offered the latter and Humphrey refused it that she remembered that he hated anything chocolate. It was James who loved chocolate mousse.

‘A little cheese, my dear, if you have it – that would round off the meal perfectly.’

Of course one had cheese, several different kinds, Leonora thought, as she went to get it. In the larder misery came over her. She leaned against the edge of a shelf, her forehead resting on the tins – prawns and lobster, asparagus tips, white peaches – that she always kept in case James should call unexpectedly for a meal. It was so long since he had done that now. If only, when she went back into the dining-room, James could be sitting there instead of Humphrey!

Humphrey chose this moment, when she stood there with the Stilton in her hands, to inform her that James had found a new flat and would shortly be moving into it.

‘Where is it?’ she asked, perfectly in control now.

‘Fulham, though they call it Chelsea these days. Property values have appreciated considerably in that area during the last few years and I think it should be quite a good investment for him. After all, if – as one supposes he will – James should one day decide to marry and buy a house, he can always sell the remainder of his lease …’

She let him drone on, remarking that it would be convenient for the shop. Then she began to make the coffee.

Humphrey watched her with more detachment than usual. She looked tired, he thought, not quite at her best in the black lace dress. Women of Leonora’s generation had the idea that black always suited them but often they were mistaken. He would leave soon and let her get a good night’s sleep. He refused the brandy she offered and was on his feet taking his leave of her at what seemed to Leonora an unusually early hour. He kissed her lightly on the cheek and patted her on the shoulder, murmuring something that sounded like ‘there, there,’ as one might to a child or an animal.

She felt now as if she had been cheated of something, a warmer show of affection, the kiss she had expected and had decided to allow him. They might even have ended up in bed and it could have been cosy and comforting for her.

‘I suppose James will be wanting to move his furniture, then,’ she said, as they were saying goodnight.

‘Well, I suppose so.’ Really, that furniture would soon be falling to pieces at this rate, Humphrey thought. First from James’s Notting Hill Gate flat, then into store, then out of store to that cottage in the country, then to Leonora’s house, and now to Fulham. ‘Don’t let it upset you,’ he added. ‘I can arrange everything.’

‘One would hardly let the moving of a few pieces of furniture upset one,’ said Leonora at her coldest.

‘Well, my dear, if you
should
need me for anything …,’ said Humphrey, a little deflated. Again he patted her shoulder and she went back into the house, feeling that -the evening had not been a success.

XXI

‘Jimmie, you really have the most beautiful
feet
– did anyone ever tell you?’

James shook his head; nobody had ever paid him that kind of compliment before.

‘Do you go about barefoot much? That could be the reason.’

‘Well, not in England.’

‘But this doesn’t
feel
like England, does it …?’ Ned stretched himself out on the synthetic black fur rug.

‘No, it doesn’t feel like anywhere,’ James agreed.

‘And yet it’s
everywhere.’
 Ned was about to quote Donne until he remembered that James was totally uneducated in English literature and that with him there could be none of the pleasure of flinging quotations back and forth at each other.

‘You know,’James said after a while, ‘I think I’ll
have
to go and see her.’

‘Oh, you mean Leonora. But surely she knows? Your uncle will have told her.’

‘Yes, he has. But I can’t just have the furniture moved out and not say anything to her. After all, I’m still very fond of her and I don’t want to hurt her more than I need.’

‘Oh, Jimmie, that conscience again! So you’re still fond of her – what does “fond”
mean
? So you hurt her – but that’s what loving
is,
hurting and being hurt. Believe me, I
know.’

They had had this conversation before and it had occurred to James more than once to wonder whether Ned had ever been hurt himself or whether he had always been the one to do the hurting.

‘I’ve had to hurt people so many
times,’
Ned went on. ‘Oh, Jimmie, it tears one apart!’

‘It might tear the other person apart too,’ James observed, with a cynicism unusual in him. ‘I’ll go and see her tomorrow.’

For a moment Ned looked almost anxious but the shadow soon passed from his face. James would be no exception to the rule that nobody tired of Ned before he tired of them.

James felt nervous standing on the doorstep, waiting for Leonora to open the door. He had left his keys at the shop, otherwise he could have slipped up to the flat and taken a drink to give him courage. But it was four o’clock in the afternoon and it might have seemed odd to her if he appeared to have been drinking at that time of day.

‘Darling James!’ she exclaimed.

‘Oh, Leonora …’ There had been only a split second’s hesitation before they embraced and for a moment it seemed as if everything was going to be all right again.

But when they started to talk it was obvious that things were not as they had once been. Conversation was sticky. Leonora asked politely after Ned and was told that he was well; she inquired after the progress of his thesis about which James seemed less sure. Then James supposed that Leonora must know that he had found a new flat, which of course she did. She also guessed that he had come to arrange with her about when his furniture should be moved out.

While all this was going on they hardly looked at each other. James could see that Leonora had just had her hair done and was wearing a dark blue dress that was new to him. A Georgian paste and enamel brooch – his last present to her – was pinned to the collar. Leonora noticed that James’s hair needed cutting – or was he wearing it longer now? – and that he had round his neck a silk scarf she had given him in the early days of their friendship. All this had been gathered from the quick, almost suspicious glances they had stolen at each other. They had not looked into each other’s eyes to see what lay there. Neither seemed equal to that.

‘Humphrey said he would arrange things,’ said Leonora, ‘on the day, that is.’

‘I’m perfectly capable of arranging my own move,’ said James, glad to be able to take out his guilt on his uncle.

‘I stopped your milk some time ago,’ said Leonora, ‘but at first, when it kept coming, I didn’t know what to do.’

‘I’m sorry, I should have let you know or something,’ James mumbled. It seemed to him that only a woman could think of a trivial thing like stopping the milk when one was in the middle of an affair.

‘Oh, it was all right. Liz can always use plenty of milk for the cats. She paid me for it.’

‘You must come and see the new flat soon,’ said James.

‘Yes, of course,’ said Leonora, turning her head away.

There was a rather long silence. James had a terrible fear that she might be going to cry or make some kind of scene.

‘Oh, Leonora,’ he began, ‘it isn’t that I don’t love you . .

Leonora looked up at him, startled. The word ‘love’ had not been mentioned between them before.

‘I shall always love you,’ James went on, hardly making things better, for ‘always’ had such a final sound about it; it might just as well have been ‘never’.

‘James, dear, you really are rather stupid,’ she said in a cool tone. ‘You know I’ve never wanted to stop you from having your own friends – after all, one isn’t a monster. You loved Phoebe and now you love Ned. When Ned goes back to America, as he no doubt will in time, you’ll love somebody else.’

‘But Leonora, I’m
not
like that. If only I could explain …’ James moved his head from side to side in hopelessness.

‘And now, James, I really must turn you out – I’m dining with an old Italian friend tonight and I want to have a little rest first.’

She did not watch him go but waited until she heard the sound of his car driving away before she went upstairs to gather strength and make herself elegant for the Conte, who liked to eat steak and kidney pudding and drink Guinness whenever he was in London. It gave her only the merest vestige of satisfaction to remember the hurt look on James’s face, but she was rather pleased with herself for having had the courage to deal with him as she had. To hear the word ‘love’ actually spoken might well have been too much for somebody like, say, poor Meg.

The day before James’s move Leonora took advantage of a long-standing invitation to spend a few days with the Murrays at their country cottage. She had always rather despised them and of course November wasn’t the ideal time to leave London, but she knew that they had every modern comfort and Joan had arranged a party on the Friday evening which might be quite amusing. Humphrey and James would supervise the moving of the furniture on Saturday, and Liz had promised to look in to see that all was well after they had gone.

The journey westwards in a comfortable first-class carriage did something to soothe Leonora’s feelings. There were only three other occupants, two substantial-looking men, occupied with taking papers out of their briefcases and putting them back again, and a young woman deeply absorbed in a paperback with a pornographic cover. Leonora was the only person to respond to the summons to tea and found herself placed at a small window table already occupied by another person.

She sat with downcast eyes, as some women do when faced with a strange man. Leonora did not trust the kind of man one was apt to meet in trains, though in her younger days she had been bolder. She had a book with her – Tennyson’s
In Memoriam
in a rather pleasing leather-bound edition – which she immediately opened and tried to read, but it was difficult to concentrate, what with trying to pour tea against the jolting movement of the train, and the fact that
In Memoriam
was perhaps not the kind of reading one would have chosen for a meal taken under difficult circumstances. She had really intended to read it in bed at the Murrays’, preferably in the watches of the night when she lay sleepless.

She succeeded in having first pour from the shared milk jug and negotiated her own little teapot successfully. Then hot buttered toast was brought and there was the question of what to eat with it.

‘Will you have some jam?’

The stranger opposite was offering her first choice of the little pots of jam, holding them out on a plate encouragingly. Raising her eyes she saw that he was a very good-looking clergyman.

‘I don’t know …’ Leonora was used to men suggesting or choosing food for her in restaurants, but perhaps this was not quite the same.

‘Yellow, red, green or purple?’

‘Which would
you
recommend?’

‘That depends. Perhaps somebody reading Tennyson would prefer purple?’ he suggested, with an air of gallantry.

‘Yes, purple, I think; red and yellow would be unsympathetic.’ She smiled and looked up at him. Clergymen, however handsome, were
safe,
one felt, though this might well be an old-fashioned notion. It would be all right to flirt with him a little, in the way that only middle-aged people did flirt nowadays.

It turned out that he was going to Malvern – his brother was headmaster of a school there, He implied, without actually saying it, that it was a pity Leonora was not going to Malvern too.

‘I shall be getting out at Moreton-in-Marsh where my friends are meeting me,’ Leonora explained.

‘Alas …’ He smiled.

‘Together?’ The restaurant car attendant was hovering over them ready to make out the bill.

‘No,
apart,’
said Leonora quickly.

He was too delicate in his behaviour to attempt to pay for her tea; that would have been very brash, Leonora decided. As she swayed back along the corridor – he had earlier entered a second-class carriage – she felt encouraged by the little episode. She was still beautiful, still ‘desirable’, if that wasn’t putting it too strongly. She could make something of the encounter when Joan drove her from the station.

But in the car Joan went on boringly about having to call at a teashop run by some woman who had promised to make vol-au-vents for the party which hadn’t been ready when she had called earlier. And Dickie was bringing some caviare and it had to be spread on biscuits. And did Leonora mind, but she hadn’t had time to make her bed yet.

Leonora sat rather stiffly in the car, wondering why she had come. It was ominous, the bed not yet being made, as if she wasn’t really expected. She needed to be
very
well looked after this weekend.

When they reached the cottage she felt more hopeful. Dickie opened a bottle of champagne to revive her after the journey and the room they had given her was quiet and looked over the garden. While Joan had been out somebody had made the bed and there were flowers in a pink lustre jug on the bedside table.
In Memoriam
seemed perfectly in keeping with the pretty Victorian objects that adorned the mantelpiece and dressing table. While she was changing, Joan came into the room, ostensibly to have her dress zipped up but really to ask Leonora about James.

‘My dear, we’ve heard such things – can they be
true?’

Luckily the front door bell rang before Leonora could go into the subject ofjames. She never minded the first plunge into a party and entered the room with her usual confidence. But the Murrays’ friends turned out to be exceptionally uninteresting and Leonora realised now that she was too tired to make the effort needed for sparkling conversation, even if she had wanted to. After the party had been going for some time she found herself stranded on a sofa with an unattached woman in a bright blue dress, who had somehow fastened on to her and who kept eyeing her in a critical way.

‘I can see
you
come from London,’ she said. ‘You look so washed out.’

The woman’s own toothy ruddy face certainly didn’t look
that
; a glance at it convinced Leonora that one would prefer to look ‘washed out’, whatever that might mean.

‘What do you
do
?’ asked the woman. ‘Didn’t Joan tell me you were in the BBC? I wish they wouldn’t play all that dreadful pop.’

Leonora informed her coldly that she was not in the BBC, and that she didn’t have a job.

‘You mean you do
nothing?’

‘One lives one’s own life.’

‘But you could do voluntary work, surely?’

The question was not worth answering, but Leonora’s silence gave the woman the chance to enumerate all the things she might do – hospital work, old people, mentally handicapped children, the lonely ones, there were so many lonely ones …

‘Now then, Ba,’ said Dickie coming to the rescue, ‘everyone’s going. If you’re quick the Fosdykes will give you a lift.’

‘Goodness, is that the time?’ The woman, now identified as ‘Ba’, got up and almost scuttled into the hall.

Suddenly everyone had gone.

‘Good old Ba,’ said Dickie, ‘always the first to arrive and the last to go. Sorry you got stuck with her, Leonora.’

Leonora gave him a faint smile of forgiveness, but there was no forgiveness in her heart. How could he have let it happen?

‘Poor old Leonora,’ said Dickie when, very much later, he and Joan were washing up the glasses. ‘She doesn’t seem in quite her usual form.’

‘But she’s always so elegant and that was a
lovely
dress,’ said Joan loyally. ‘It was just bad luck she got landed with Ba.’

‘She’s so cold and inhuman, or something,’ said Dickie, ‘I always feel I’d like to …’

‘Now, darling, don’t be beastly about Leonora,’ said Joan, with a delighted giggle.

‘But suppose one
did
… That’s really just what she needs. Do you think Humphrey ever has?’

‘Just
imagine
them – no, I
can’t
…’ Joan was shaking with suppressed laughter now, so that Leonora, lying in bed in the room above, heard what sounded almost like sobs coming from the kitchen. Then of course she realised that it was laughter – Joan and Dickie being silly about something, as they so often were. She wished now that she hadn’t come, but it had seemed better to be away when James’s things were moved out. But was she going to be able to sleep tonight? The bed, though comfortable, was not her own, and when she looked up there was darkness where the window should have been.

The next day Leonora had one of her migraines. There was nothing she could do but lie in the strange bed, dozing fitfully, being sick, then dozing again, her splitting head full of James’s furniture going up and down the stairs, each piece woven into a kind of pattern that was pressing inside her head until she thought it would burst. Every now and then Joan would tiptoe up the stairs, pop her guilt-stricken face round the door and ask if there was anything she wanted. Once she heard Dickie singing, only to be sharply hushed by Joan. She knew that she had cast a blight over the house and that they would never ask her again, but she felt too ill to care.