When Blackbirds Sing (12 page)

In the morning while he was dressing, the telephone rang in his room. It was Sylvia. She had not taken into account the fact that through travelling so often with her father down to Frome, she was well known at Paddington station. She said that it would be better if they did not meet
openly on the platform, but entered the train separately, joining each other after it had started. Dominic agreed to this reluctantly. In his new sense of power and freedom he did not want to have to take into account the moral susceptibilities of railway porters.

Followed by one of them he walked along the platform where the Cornish express was waiting, and had a glimpse of Sylvia already installed in an otherwise empty compartment. She had given a good tip to keep it so, and the porter was used to obliging her father in the same way.

As soon as the train had started Dominic moved along to join her. Apart from this arrangement, and the fact that when the train an hour or two later whizzed through Frome Sylvia pulled down the blind by her window, there was no suggestion of romance about their escapade. They were like two friends who had planned a holiday together, or even like a married couple returning to the country after a London visit. After luncheon in the dining-car they returned to doze in their compartment, or browsed through the illustrated papers which Sylvia had bought, until they arrived at Penzance late in the afternoon.

They went to the largest and presumably the best hotel, where they booked a room and a dressing-room as man and wife. The rooms were large and darkly furnished, but the hotel was high up, and the windows looked across the bay to St Michael’s Mount. The evening sun, shining on the little monastery-castle which crowned the mount, made it appear like some Wagnerian shrine of the Holy Grail. While Sylvia was changing after her journey, Dominic leaned on his window-sill and stared across at it. He liked seeing
famous places of which he had heard in his childhood. He was pleased that they could see it from their windows. Without it these hotel rooms might have been a little sordid.

At dinner they became more cheerful and conscious of the object of their journey. The food down here was better than that in London restaurants, and they had good wine. Afterwards they walked for half an hour or so on the darkened quay, but Dominic was impatient to return to the hotel. It may have been because of the provincial dullness, the heavy respectability of their rooms, that he put out the lights when he came into her room. He did not want to feast his eyes on her in this place, but he flung open the window to the summer night and the stars, the sea and the castle.

His love-making was not as burning but it was as strong as the evening before. They lay locked together, believing that they were at last one, each possessing the other, finally, absolutely for eternity.

But when in the morning, after they had parted to dress, they met again to go down to breakfast, it was as if a curtain had fallen between them. Afterwards they walked about the town, looking at the old houses and into the shop windows. But something had gone from their daytime relationship, the tension, the bickering which indicated exciting possibilities. The possibilities had become certainties, and for the moment that gave them a deeper satisfaction, but it made it harder to pass the time. In the afternoon they hired a motor-car and drove to Land’s End.

On the second night he was less urgent in his love-making. It was as if he wondered after all whether he really knew her, and was trying to understand her so that she
would be truly his own. He was like a blind man trying to learn her with his hands. It seemed that he could never satisfy this curiosity to know her, could never understand what he was seeking in her.

In the small hours of the morning he awoke and saw a waning moon in the square of the window. He left the bed and went to look out at the castle on its little island across the bay, now more remote and mysterious, more legendary than ever in the moonlight. He wanted to understand it in the same way that he wanted to understand Sylvia, to know why it filled him with longing to be united to something outside himself.

She awoke and found he was not beside her. Then she saw him by the window, his bare shoulders outlined by the moonlight.

“What are you doing?” she asked, and came over to join him. He thought that she was sharing his feeling about the castle and the sea. He felt her arm against his own, and he turned and drew her to him, wanting to make her share his feeling about the castle and the sea, to extend his love to include every beautiful thing.

The next morning again the curtain descended between them. They walked about the town almost in boredom. Dominic reminded himself that it was marvellous for him to be walking in this peaceful sleepy town.

“It’s wonderful to be out of the trenches,” he said.

“Yes. It must be,” said Sylvia, but for her it was only an intellectual idea. In the afternoon he wanted to go over to St Michael’s Mount, but Sylvia did not like going over country houses as a sightseer. She thought it was like prying on people
whom later she might meet. There was even the possibility that there might be someone staying there who knew her by sight. She seemed to be daily more anxious about the risks of their escapade.

When they awoke next morning they followed the same routine, the descending curtain of convention, the breakfast, the newspapers, the stroll, the shops.

In the afternoon they went to St Ives. Dominic suggested dining there and returning afterwards to Penzance. She thought that would be tiresome. Then she said: “Oh, very well.” At least it would give them something to talk about.

On this night Dominic stood a long time at the window, looking at the sea and the castle, which she refused to visit. She became impatient, not because she was urgent to have him beside her, but because a kind of remoteness in his attitude irritated her.

In the morning Sylvia woke him early and said that she wanted to leave Penzance. She felt that she could not bear another morning looking in the same shop windows.

“Where can we go?” asked Dominic sleepy and bemused.

“Why not return to London? There’s always something to do, and it’s really safer. We’re rather conspicuous here.” This was certainly true. With the contrast in their good looks, with Sylvia’s quiet air of wealth and unconscious arrogance, they were splendid exotic animals in the provincial street—a black and a golden panther.

Dominic ran his hands through his hair. He thought that in some way he had failed her, as he had failed himself. On that first evening at Catherine Street he had imagined
that the delight in his body, that wild sense of power—it was not free love that he had enjoyed but wild love—was enough in itself, that it had banished forever all his doubts and uncertain aspirations. But he could not change his nature in a night, and he still expected that in Cornwall his love would have some meaning beyond itself, would be linked up with the moonlit castle and the sea.

Sylvia had no idea that this was his expectation. She knew perfectly well what she wanted. She wanted him physically. She wanted to experience his passionate unrestrained love-making without fear of interruption by her maid. She knew her own mind, and was confident that as the daughter of a rich peer, every idea she held was the right one. She was sure she was entitled to the best, and as Dominic’s bodily passion was like a flame consuming her, whereas Maurice’s was matter of fact and correct like all his other activities, and as she thought Maurice lucky to have married her and therefore in no position to complain, she really believed that it was right and natural that she should have Dominic if she wanted him. It was her
droit de la grande dame
. But she did not think that her feelings for Dominic or his for her had any point beyond their own physical satisfaction.

Because he thought he had failed her he agreed to go. Sylvia then said that if they hurried they could catch the morning train, and they left Penzance as impulsively as they had come there.

At breakfast she put forward another plan to him, that he should leave the express at Exeter and go on by a slow train to Frome, and spend a night or two at Dilton with her parents. She had various motives for this. One
was that it would avoid the risk of his being seen with her at Paddington. Also, it would put out of her mother’s mind any idea that they had been together. Most of all perhaps because she would not mind a few days’ rest from his exclusive company. She told him what she knew would convince him, but what she also believed, that her father would be hurt if he did not go to see them.

“Shouldn’t I let them know?” asked Dominic doubtfully.

“You can ring up from the station,” said Sylvia. “On leave you can do anything. Anyhow, they’ll be delighted to see you. Say you’ve been to stay with a friend in Cornwall. They think I’m with Hermione.”

When he left her in the train at Exeter they kissed in a rather perfunctory way, but comfortable and friendly.

“You’d better stay two days with the family,” she said. “I’ll go to Hermione for tonight. Ring up when you get to London.”

It was all matter of fact, and from Sylvia’s point of view entirely satisfactory. Dominic thought too that perhaps it was better this way than if they were in such an emotionally heightened condition that they could not bear to part for a minute, the condition he was in when he left Helena.

He rang up from the Frome railway station and Lady Dilton said that they would be delighted to see him, and that she would send a car for him at once.

When he arrived she was still engaged in sending out some kind of circular or charity invitation, and she gave the impression that she had not left her writing table since he last saw her.

“I hope you didn’t mind my coming without warning,” said Dominic, and blurted out: “Sylvia said I might come.”

“Of course not.” She gave him a sharp glance. “You’ve seen Sylvia?”

“Yes. I saw her in London,” said Dominic, a little awkward and hesitating, but he was often like this when sharply questioned.

“I rang up last night and they said she was in Hertfordshire.”

“I saw her the day I arrived,” explained Dominic, more confidently. “I’ve been in Cornwall for a few days.”

“Have you friends there?” asked Lady Dilton; but without interest. She went on to say that her husband would be over to dinner and would “want to hear all about the war”.

When Lord Dilton arrived he was delighted to see Dominic, for every reason—personally because he liked him; also because he heard he had done well at the front and so had brought credit to the territorial battalion, justifying his confidence in the ugly duckling; and also because he was touched that a young man on leave should be so thoughtful as to desert the gaieties of London to come to stay with two old fogies. He immediately went down to the cellars to find something worthy of him.

At dinner he made his old jokes about the bath water, and Dominic had a contented and peaceful feeling of being at home. His simplicity made him accept odd situations, until he was aware of considerations which showed them to be outrageous. It did not occur to him that it was shocking, even treacherous, to accept the affection and confidence of
people whose married daughter he had seduced, and whom he had parted from only a few hours earlier. It was partly because he regarded the Tunstalls as a group, responsible for each other. In times past they had presented themselves as a group, rather an overbearing one. When he was engaged to Sylvia he had the sense of being engaged to all the Tunstalls. So now because Sylvia, who bossed her parents, had told him to come here, he thought it quite allowable to do so; and he almost felt that her parents must know and approve the liaison. Anyhow it could hardly be called a seduction.

When Lord Dilton heard that Dominic was staying for two days, he said that he would come over again to dine on the following evening. “Or would you like to dine in the mess?” he asked. Dominic said apologetically that when he was on leave it was more of a treat for him to dine in a private house.

“Can’t you find some young people to make it a bit cheerful for him?” Lord Dilton asked his wife.

“I like it here just as it is,” said Dominic.

“I can ask Marcus,” said Lady Dilton.

“That’ll be lively,” said Lord Dilton.

Colonel Rodgers, frustrated by his failure at the War Office, had become the incarnation of a small war in himself. There was anger in every movement, in every tone of his staccato voice. In his tight old-fashioned dinner jacket he looked more than ever like a large ant. During the whole of dinner he was angry, about the larger strategy of the war, and about subalterns who took the stiffening out of their army caps and wore pale yellow collars. At the suggestion that the war might end before long he
actually trembled with anger, although he drank only water, following the strangely nonconformist example of the King; while his brother-in-law and Dominic finished the decanter of burgundy between them.

When Lady Dilton had left the room he questioned Dominic about every detail of life in the trenches, and even asked him if he had “killed his man”. Lord Dilton was fidgety and bored. When he passed round the port Colonel Rodgers pushed it on impatiently. Nothing mellow or pleasant must interrupt the steely stark horror which was his obsession. Everything must be hell. Dominic, relaxed after four nights of desperate love-making, felt himself defenceless against the violence of the colonel’s mania.

Lord Dilton pushed back his chair abruptly and said: “We’d better go in to Edith. She’ll want a rubber before you go.” He did not wait to blow out the candles as was his usual custom.

The rubber of bridge was more distracting than the dinner. During every deal, and even when he was dummy, Colonel Rodgers continued questioning Dominic about the trenches. When Lord Dilton was dummy he pulled the bell-rope, and asked for the whisky tray immediately, hoping it would speed his brother-in-law’s departure. As soon as the rubber was finished, the colonel, with superfluous apologies for leaving early, said that he must go. When he said goodbye to Dominic his angry voice warmed a little with emotion, and in his strange insect’s eyes was a ray of affection.