The Young Desire It (36 page)

With great strength of relaxation, he held himself still until his mother had finished. As always, she ate slowly, methodically, seeming not to taste the food at which she looked with mild surprise as she put it to her lips. He thought how ridiculous is the human face taking in food—the raised eyebrows, the drooped, careful lids, the hungry width of the mouth opening as the head and shoulders lean forward possessively over the plate, crouching and sure. Turning from her face to the day so that his eyes should not discomfort her, he saw it hard and bright already through the holes in an old creeper that hung its curtain of dark outward green from the veranda eaves. There was still that flowery magic smell of sun-bleached grass, sweet on the air; and the air in their shadow was cool, for Jimmy had been watering lawns and gardens at sunrise, and now the morning heat sucked up vapours of water and earth, and dried the wet leaves.

‘Son!'

His mother's voice, mild and tired, sounded a note of urgent warning. He looked round from his frowning stare.

‘Don't do that. It does look so ugly.'

‘What was I doing?' he asked.

‘Biting your nails. It's such a bad habit, darling,' she pleaded mildly. ‘You've never done it before. Only since you came home this time…I don't know what's the matter with you.'

He refused to reply to her last words.

‘All right,' he said, and added, inanely, ‘It's not as though I'm hungry.'

I am hungry, he thought, I am, I am. In another way.

She was looking away from him, and her hands, that were usually so still and sure, that had comforted him so often with their quietness, now trembled as she fidgeted surprisingly with a spoon.

‘You'd better go early,' she said, and her voice was as unsure as her hands and wrists. ‘You can't make the girl follow you about when it gets too hot. Though no doubt she—she would.'

She had made a show of speaking lightly, but the words brought him to his feet in one movement; his face went white, and he opened and closed his lips once, before he could reply.

‘How dare you say that, Mother? How dare you? She follow me! Why—why—Oh! I follow her, if that's what you want to know. Yes, I do. And I will, I will, I tell you.'

She was startled by the passion with which he spoke, by the dark flame of anger and fear in his green-brown eyes. Unable for some seconds to reply, she made a small, helpless movement with her hand. He saw it, and sat down suddenly.

‘I don't know what's the matter,' he said in a voice that trembled. ‘It's been like this ever since I told you. I wish I never had—I've wished it ever since.'

‘Oh, God,' she said quietly, and began to cry, her face still save for an incessant trembling of lips and eyelids.

‘I know,' he said. ‘I know. You don't think I care what you feel. But I do.'

He was ashamed of an impulse to laugh, to laugh hysterically in her face, to shake his fist at her and tell her to cry; an impulse to increase and swell out his own suffering to breaking-point and release.

‘I often wonder,' she said brokenly. ‘For such a long time…Ever since you went to School you've been different.'

He said quickly, ‘Well, you made me go, didn't you? I never wanted to, and I've never liked it.'

‘Of course you had to go.'

‘Then…'

‘But that's not the point.'

‘What, then?'

‘You've changed in another way.'

‘Yes—started to grow up.'

‘You're not grown up yet, my child,' she said. ‘Don't think it.'

‘All right,' he said. ‘You want to keep me not grown up, I think. Can't I live my own life now? I always used to, and you didn't mind then. Why do you mind now?'

‘You don't love me any more.'

‘Oh, I do!' he cried, exasperated.

‘Then don't go away from me to-day, son.' Her voice pleaded with him. ‘Don't go. Stay with me to-day.'

Slow tears filled his own eyes.

‘You're mad,' he said. ‘You're mad to say that.'

‘All right,' she said, suddenly looking up, her eyes bright. ‘That—girl. I know…'

‘Don't,' he said. ‘You don't understand. You make me feel you've never been young.'

‘You're wrong,' she said, so that he could hardly hear her. ‘You're terribly wrong and unkind. Perhaps I understand better than you think. Perhaps that's why…'

She could not end it.

‘Why what?' he said wildly.

‘Perhaps that's why I don't want you to get mixed up with any girl at your age.'

‘Mixed up! Mixed up!'

‘You're young,' she said, averting her face. ‘You don't know—it's impossible to know the risks. Believe me, son, I'm only thinking of your happiness. And it's so—so—hard.'

‘Happiness,' he said. ‘Would you like to meet her? Would you like me to bring her here?'

Her hand went suddenly to her breast.

‘No doubt she would come,' she said.

‘Would you like her to?'

‘No.'

The look in her face made him unable to speak. They sat still, passionately regarding each other now, and it seemed to him that the restraint of decency and good manners she had taught him had been by her thrown violently aside. Words choked in his throat and dissolved there into bubbles of breath. He was frightened of himself, now that all pretence was away from them.

‘Damn you,' he said.

Rising, kicking back his chair so that it fell with a sound startling after the quietness of their voices, running along the veranda into the house, he thought furiously, I shall regret that for the rest of my life. And he did not care. If she called after him he would not answer. There was one being on earth whom he wanted to see now; all others were enemies, madly against him. If she called he would neither hear nor reply.

She did not call. At the foot of the stairs he took up the knapsack already packed by himself, and for some moments stood perfectly still in the dim coolness of shadow there, his breath quick and dry, his mind suddenly arrested so that he could not move. The image of his mother's face bitterly accusing him, of Penworth saying good-bye, of himself moving between these two, and then a startling image of the girl to whom he would go turning her face up towards his, held his mind and body in a petrifaction of terror and triumph…

At last, in a sudden relaxation, he sat down abruptly on the lowest stair, as he had sat outside Penworth's room that cold night and heard the dramatic passion of the Cesar Franck sonata for the first time. He remained there for a moment. The house was strangely still, as though listening with him. Rising as abruptly, he shouldered the straps of the knapsack, and went out by another door into the hot golden day, through the green, still orchard red and purple with shadow and sun on the earth, towards the stables beyond, where the mare was waiting for the saddle.

When he was gone she had remained sitting quite still, the grief of her defeat holding her rigid there with her elbows on the white cloth, her hands clasped and trembling, her eyes turned sideways towards the garden, where day rioted already like a madman loosed. Through the holes in the creeper's curtain, bonfire salvia twenty yards away blazed defiance at her, redder than any flame would have been in that still, tempestuous sunlight, red as blood above its emerald leaves.

The tears dried from her eyelashes and her cheeks. She found herself thinking, I don't like that salvia. I shall never plant it again.

By the time Charles came to the new farm his fear was a rage of terror, his hope an equal rage of desperate determination. He did not know what he was to do with these two dangerous and unwieldy weapons. When he leant down from the saddle to open the gate, he drove back the sign of conflict from his face, and it went in deep like a poison, making him numbed and unnaturally calm.

It will be right, it will be right, he repeated in his mind; and those two weapons, over-big for him to use it seemed, clattered together inwardly in a boiling silence, while a part of consciousness, remote from all stress, stood by smiling and observing him.

‘I should have been here before,' he said to Mrs. McLeod when she opened the wire door to him.

‘Och noo!' she murmured, ‘y'ken sh'only arrived yesterday.'

Her eyes slid round on him with that same elusive concealment of mockery, and with something else also, some flash of suspicion that justified his guardedness. He had manufactured a lie to act, on his way hither, and that look confirmed him in it.

‘Oh—I thought—oh well, that's all right, then,' he said, forcing relief into his voice, and lightness. ‘I've been all the week getting used to being home again.'

All the week waiting for this moment, he thought, and ached with the fear still surging in him. Clearly she too was watching him. He did not care.

‘It seems a long time,' he said.

He did not realize that neither of them had spoken Margaret's name, though she must have been very vividly present in the thoughts of both of them.

‘Do you think she would come out somewhere and have lunch?' he asked with admirable casualness. ‘It's pretty hot; still, she might like.'

Mrs. McLeod leaned forward into the dark doorway leading into the inner rooms of the house.

‘Meg,' she cried, ‘here's a young man come jus' noo, speerin' after y'. Come and see what.'

She turned round to him, her face serious now, and secretly unsympathetic.

‘Y'ken they're taking her away t'England,' she said, and the bitter concern in her voice now seemed accusing and guarded, though her eyes were full of a surprising pity for him, and her face sad at the thought of her own loss. She appeared to know that he knew; he thought she sighed as she went back to her table by a window over which a blind was drawn low, and the light fell on her arms and hands moving firmly in their work. He could say nothing. ‘Ye'll take guid care o' her,' she said firmly, with her back to him.

‘Yes,' he said, ‘I will. Of course.'

The tone of her voice, guarded, almost as though warning him of himself, made him again realize that their world held more than their two selves, and that others were to be affected by her actions also; and this realization drove him dumb, until suddenly Margaret came in, and he must speak.

‘I thought you'd—I wondered if you'd perhaps like to come out and we could have some lunch,' he said with some difficulty. Mrs. McLeod clattered things on her table without looking round.

‘I'll come,' she said, and looked at him. Her direct, dark glance was like a look of uncontrollable rage. He did not recognize it or know what purpose lay behind it.

‘She does as she likes,' Mrs. McLeod said pleasantly. ‘Don't you, our bairn?'

‘Yes,' the girl said. Her voice trembled, and again he met her look, direct and dark from the depths of her eyes, and again it seemed as though she were struggling with a rage of fury she could scarcely control. He remembered how she had spoken, when they were together on the afternoon of the sports meeting, of what people said about her doing as she liked; she had been in passionate disagreement, and he wondered whether that was the reason for her startling look as she said ‘Yes'. But the dramatic stillness and fury of her glance gave him the sensation of having seen a cover lifted from a cauldron of something so hot that it could not move, like molten metal, though it was liquid. He wanted to look, but he wanted also to step back, as a man does at the sight of a thing dangerous and not altogether controlled or calculable. This had happened to her since he saw her last.

‘Well,' he said, ‘shall we go soon, before it gets too hot? I don't want to drag you round in the heat too much. We'll go to the big pool, if you like. It's always cool there.'

‘All right,' she said. As she went out he called to her down the length of the room.

‘If you're reading something, better bring it. It's not much use doing anything lively now.'

‘What d'ye mean by “lively”?' Mrs. McLeod asked.

Unconscious of her mocking smile, he answered gravely, ‘Well, running about and doing things that make you hot.'

‘Eh, when I was a bit of a thing like Meg we didna mind making oursel's a bit hot, forb'e! I wouldna say it was just wi' running about, y'ken.'

He did not hear her. He was wondering still about that incomprehensible look; it was the expression of one in pain or fear, or the anger of a furious purpose. That there had been no quarrelling he was certain; no one could quarrel or be angry with that cheerful big woman. Was it against himself, then? Perhaps he had done wrong to come like this. But after that note; after that last futile outcry on the paper? It could not be against himself.

The morning was very still. From beneath the fig trees outside, heavy now with huge leaves and swelling fruit, a lazy clucking of fowls came to their ears. The mare was in the shade; from time to time she stamped a hoof at the flies, standing there motionless in the strong black shadow of the tree. The light swam like water, shaking and eddying as it consumed outlines so that they seemed to melt. Charles leaned against the door-post, aware of the quiet, the small sounds, and the day's still power. He could hear the light secretly vibrating into a mirage shimmer.

‘May I leave Julia?' he asked presently.

‘Ay, do,' she said.

‘I can get her when we come back,' he explained, unable as he was unwilling to imagine anything of that return; knowing only that it would be late.

‘Put her in the calf paddock jus' noo,' she said. ‘Y' wouldna leave her tied a' day?'

‘No. That'll be splendid then. Thank you.'

He walked out into the sun, glad to be gone for a time from the feeling of difficulty and unhappiness that hung, a different, subtler shadow, in the doorway. While he was hauling off the saddle, smelling the hot leather above, the hot sweated padding beneath, he thought, At home, and here too. As though someone were going to die. (He could imagine no more terrible suspense than that of waiting for a death.) The feeling of conflict became clear in his mind, as clear and sharp as the ring of the stirrup irons clashing together when he heaved the saddle into the crutch of the tree. Julia shook herself with a little thunder. Taking the rein, he led her out to the small paddock, where old barren plum-trees were growing in broken rows, two or three together, giving a scattered, illusory shade in the burning day. Such a conflict was quite foreign to his memory of home and this country; coming away from the School he had wanted urgently to leave all warring externals behind him, as he had always done; and now he found he was still under their power. His mother was watching him just as the Scotswoman watched him and Margaret. She herself was changed, it seemed. The look of rage in her eyes, the look of a runner who sees the end of a race and is in a fury to be done—that was a look he had never seen in anyone's face before. He could not understand that she had a purpose now, for he himself had none; the separation they were approaching had already robbed him of every energy save that of hope, which, facing a future undefined by any certainties, knew not how to run.