When Blackbirds Sing (8 page)

At luncheon with Cousin Emma he talked a great deal about Helena and his home, which did not interest her as his establishment did not sound elegant, and she asked why he had fruit trees growing so close to the house. She was more interested in the names of the officers in his regiment, and she asked him if he had been again to Dilton, and he told her only to dine.

“Have you seen that girl you were engaged to?” she asked, giving him a sharp, old woman’s glance.

“Yes,” said Dominic. “She’s married. She lives in London.”

“Do you see her?”

“Yes,” said Dominic.

Cousin Emma changed the subject. When he left she came with him to the door. Dominic, living for two or three months as a student in her house, had driven her nearly crazy; but she now felt an affection for him, especially as he was handsome, “smart”, and going to the front.

“Let me know your address in France,” she said, “and I’ll send you a plum cake from Harrods.”

Dominic walked from Brompton Square to Catherine Street, as he had time to fill in. His mind was full of the associations of his family and his home. His father’s kindness in sending him the money, when he knew that he had little to spare; the unexpected glimpse of Cousin Emma’s affection when he had always thought of her as worldly and censorious; above all Helena’s letter, created a picture in his mind in which Sylvia had no part. When he did think of her she was even destructive of the picture. She blotted it out. The alliance with the Tunstalls would have been disproportionate to the Langtons’ way of life. It would have disrupted it, like a patch of new cloth on an old garment. When the engagement was broken the family recovered its integrity. He remembered the scene at Waterpark when Sylvia had given him back his ring—the faint amusement and relief, coupled with regret that Dominic had lost such a prize. They returned to their home on the other side of the world, and within a month he was married to Helena. Now Australia appeared to him as his natural setting. Over
the past fifty years the successive returns to Waterpark had always ended in misfortune, and Steven was right to refuse to live there again. He forgot his own enthusiasm for this project a few months earlier, a reaction from the six weeks’ misery on the ship.

Trying to take a short cut between Sloane Street and Grosvenor Place, he lost himself, and he compared it with being lost in the bush. His nostrils ached for the smell of gum trees. He saw the war as something he must endure to save the easy friendly life of his parents at Westhill, and of his wife and child on their farm. To Sylvia it seemed to be the occasion for a life of pleasure in London, with “war work” as the entertainment of officers in a succession of lunches at the Ritz. He felt towards her as a child feels when having made friends with a stranger, it meets some of its own group, and treats its new friend with indifference or even hostility.

When he arrived at Catherine Street she seemed to have the same feeling, though really she was bothered by the change in Dominic. She saw that he had gone from her, that something had happened to him, and she put it down to the play last night, knowing nothing of the influence of his letters from home. She knew from their past association that he was capable of sudden severe moral judgements, but she was never quite sure what provoked them. They were unrelated to the code in which she had been trained, and which she had boiled down to “never be found out”. From their near-intimacy, which she was prepared to complete, and from the way in which their conversation had immediately become allusive, she thought that he had passed
through these moral phases, that he had “grown up”, and that his attitude was much the same as her own. She did not realize that in any relationship there is always a “third party risk”, that a person unknown may say something to a man or woman which changes the attitude to a friend or lover. With Dominic the third party risk was one which she might have foreseen, a letter from Helena.

During tea he was silent and she was stilted, openly “governessy”. She almost wanted to get rid of him, she had cancelled all her engagements for the remaining days of his leave, but she was not prepared to let him treat her casually. No man might do that. To awaken some kind of response she said “I may have to go down to Dilton tomorrow. Mother’s not very well.”

Dominic looked a little surprised, but he only said: “Oh, I’m sorry,” and she did not know whether he was sorry because she was going or because her mother was unwell. She said with a touch of contempt, to point out that if she went away he would have only elderly relatives to entertain him: “Did you enjoy your lunch with Lady Langton?”

“Yes. She was awfully kind,” he answered, not seeing her intention, but thinking she was trying to bring herself, also with kind motives, into the picture which filled his mind. He smiled for the first time since he had come in, and said: “She’s going to send me a plum cake from Harrods.”

The atmosphere eased. The mutual repudiation evaporated and they began to talk again with their easy, amused bickering, and to Dominic their relationship immediately became innocent. As long as he behaved instinctively he felt that he was innocent. When he was made to think of
what he was doing, especially by something like the squalid play, he fell back on the Calvinism imposed on him in his childhood. With his ever ready generosity he was anxious to make up for his unfairness to Sylvia, while she, relieved to find that he had only been in “one of his moods”, wanted to pretend that nothing had happened. Outwardly this was so, as their quarrel had consisted entirely of telepathic waves of reconciliation, and a new degree of intimacy was achieved. They felt safer with each other.

For the next three days they spent their whole time together. Dominic felt more strongly that something of his own was being restored to him. In the evening, if they stayed in, she showed him before dinner into the bathroom which opened off her own room, and she lent him Maurice’s spare hair brushes. He waited alone in the drawing-room while she changed, and examining at his leisure its toy palatial perfection, he thought that if he had wanted to he could be living here as her husband. For the house was not Maurice’s, but, like everything in it, given to her by her father. Vaguely he felt that he had a prior right to it

They no longer bothered to go to places of amusement. On the Saturday afternoon they walked through the parks and had tea at a shop at Notting Hill Gate. Dominic wanted to return on the top of a 52 bus, but Sylvia never travelled in buses. She gave the reason that it would be too cold, but her real one, apart from her prejudice against them, was that it would be too conspicuous.

Dominic was to leave for France by a train leaving Victoria at seven o’clock on Monday morning. When they returned from Notting Hill Gate he told Sylvia that
he would like to go to church the next morning, Sunday. Conventional people, whatever their belief, still went regularly to church. Dominic had the idea that the eve of his departure to fight for his country was an occasion that required a form of knightly dedication. He asked Sylvia to go with him.

“To church?” she asked, surprised. “Very well, but where can we go?”

“There are plenty of churches. Where do you go?”

Sylvia went to St Mark’s, North Audley Street, which had the richest and smartest congregation in London. In the porch on the Sunday before Ascot one could hear them discussing the form of racehorses. She did not want to go there with Dominic, and be seen by her friends. At first she had been pleased at the quick glances or frank stares of admiration which they attracted, but since the afternoon at Hampton Court she had kept away from places where they might be known.

“There’s a church by Brompton Square,” she said. “People are married there sometimes.”

“Yes. It’s behind Cousin Emma’s house,” said Dominic.

“Does she go there?” asked Sylvia quickly.

“No. She’s a Roman Catholic. She goes to the Oratory.”

They arranged that he would call for her at half past ten. While they were in the atmosphere of arrangement, Sylvia put forward a suggestion which she had been waiting for an opportunity to make easily.

“Wouldn’t it be better,” she said, “if you stayed here tomorrow night? It’s so much closer to Victoria. You could put your heavy luggage in the cloakroom in the afternoon,
and walk to the station in the morning, without having to bother about the risk of not finding a taxi at that hour.”

“Thank you. That will be much nicer,” said Dominic. “It will be rather fun.”

Sylvia was puzzled, wondering what he meant by fun.

In the morning they went to Holy Trinity, Brompton, where they sat through the unexacting performance of Matins, and a sermon which was concerned more with the war than the Christian religion. After this there was a celebration of Holy Communion, in the middle of which half the congregation rose to leave, Sylvia with them. She had an intense dislike of going to Communion, and only did so to please her mother, if she happened to be at Dilton at Christmas or Easter. Dominic, still intent on his knightly dedication, murmured that he was “going to stay”. He was in some way both consecrating and saying farewell to all the associations of his life hitherto, offering them in defence of the freedom without which life is worthless. Sylvia could not bring herself to kneel beside him through this rite. It would be an impossibly Catholic form of intimacy, almost indecent. A public prostitute might have done so, conscious of her sins, but untroubled by any inconsistency. Dominic, although his religious teaching had been more Calvinistic than Sylvia’s, had more the nature of the Catholic prostitute. He did not divide life into separate compartments, where the inconsistencies were accepted but kept in isolation. He wanted it all related and unified.

“I’ll wait outside,” said Sylvia. She went out and strolled up and down the path at the side of the Oratory. She thought Dominic impossible. Why did he choose to
go to Holy Communion when he had arranged to spend the night with her? What did he mean by “rather fun”? In the last few days there had been accidental, or not quite accidental physical contacts between them. Desire was in their finger-tips. Or was she mistaken? No, she could not be. Tonight things must take their inevitable course. Then why must he commit this vulgarity?

She was in a state of irritation when with a dozen or so older people he came out of the church.

“Now let’s go to the Ritz,” he said cheerfully. She gave up trying to understand him. She had been afraid that he would be in a solemn or priggish mood, but his act of dedication seemed to have left little effect.

In the Brompton Road they ran into Cousin Emma coming from a late Mass. Sylvia, who knew her by sight, tried to avoid her, but Dominic deliberately drew her attention and introduced them. He even asked her to join them at luncheon, but she said that she had “one of Coco’s boys”, a General Somebody, coming to lunch with her. She looked at Sylvia with complete approval, and telling Dominic that she would not forget the plum cake, she once more said goodbye.

Sylvia, who normally regarded herself as the capable mistress of any situation, felt herself becoming dumb. Would he next suggest that she should ring up Uncle Marcus and ask him to dine with them? They walked in silence up the Brompton Road, Dominic pleased that he had been able to show her off to Cousin Emma, who had obviously been impressed. At last Sylvia burst out: “Can’t you say something?”

“What d’you want me to say?” he asked, surprised and a little amused. It pleased him to see her disturbed, in the same way that it had pleased him when she had deceived Mrs Pottinger.

“Anything, rather than walk along like a deaf mute.”

“‘To walk in silence develops the inner life’,” said Dominic, which was a quotation used as a joke in his family.

“What is the inner life?” she asked.

“Do you mean mine, or inner life generally?”

“Yours at the moment.”

“I don’t know. We have to discover our inner lives.”

“When shall we do that?” She was amused at a conversation so akin to her usual style.

He looked at her and said impudently: “Tonight perhaps.”

She almost stopped, and she could not speak for a minute. But she still thought it possible that he only meant in a conversation over the dinner table.

In the afternoon they went to the little Mayfair Hotel to collect his luggage, and took it to Victoria Station. From there, Dominic carrying a small case, they walked the few hundred yards to Catherine Street, and did not go out again. At seven o’clock there was a break in their propinquity while Sylvia went to change. During dinner she talked about food in war-time, which for her was no problem. She had chickens, game, butter and cream sent up from Dilton. There was a pheasant for dinner.

They were not like lovers, neither excited nor particularly tender. They were more like two people filling in time before a pleasant appointment. After dinner she told him
some of the criminal slanders on the Prime Minister, which were circulating in Tory society and which he had already heard from Colonel Rodgers. She believed them herself, and Dominic accepted them as curious information about a sphere outside his knowledge or interest.

The parlourmaid who waited on them saw no reason to question Sylvia’s statement: “My cousin Mr Langton will stay tonight, as he must catch the boat-train early in the morning.” There was a tenuous connection between the Langtons and the Tunstalls which excused her mentioning a relationship. Her brothers and one or two other relatives had stayed there to catch the early train.

At ten o’clock they went to bed. There was nowhere for Dominic to sleep, except in Maurice’s dressing-room. The drawing-room took up the floor below and the servants occupied the attic above. Sylvia, in a loose garment edged with swansdown, put her head round the door and said: “You can have the bathroom now.”

When he came back from the bath, the door into her room was open, and from it shone a dim rosy light. He went in to her. She was lying on the bed, looking as he had imagined her when he lay in the bath on that first night at Dilton.

The uncertainties which had irritated Sylvia during the day, giving her, as in the Brompton Road, a sense of frustration, during the evening had evaporated. Dominic’s “inner life”, the dynamo which she imagined as purring in him, had been accumulating power. They were both aware of its vibrations, and if she had not left her door ajar, confident in his power, he would have opened it.