Eustace and Hilda (53 page)

“Now don't stand gossiping, Nelly,” Sir John was saying. “I will take you, Antony shall take Edie, and the rest of you must sort yourselves out.” He extended the crook of his arm to Lady Nelly, and she slipped her hand through it, with a faint touch of coquetry, faint, but as infectious as the smile which, since she launched it, had become general.

“We thought you were never coming,” was Lady Staveley's greeting when at last Sir John brought the men back from the Banqueting Hall. “Not that we missed you, we just wondered what had happened to you. I nearly sent someone to see, because I knew how disagreeable John would be if he didn't get his rubber.”

“Dick was telling us of his scheme for benefiting the young,” said Sir John with a glance towards Hilda, who, as Eustace expected she would, turned away. “He was quite eloquent on the subject. Now who's for a game of bridge? Don't all speak at once.”

After some hanging back it was decided that he and his wife and Monica and Victor should make up the bridge four, and they went into the next room. “Now what shall we do?” said Dick. “What would you like to do, Aunt Nelly?”

“I think I shall just sit here,” said Lady Nelly, “and remember that admirable dinner.”

Eustace saw that such an inactive way of spending the evening did not appeal to Dick.

“I don't feel as if I'd had enough exercise,” he said. “Don't laugh, Anne; you're always laughing at me.”

“You should have walked here,” said Anne, “instead of coming in an aeroplane.”

An aeroplane! Eustace looked at Dick in awe. How could Anne take such a feat so casually?

“I shall have to give up flying,” said Dick; “it doesn't suit my liver. How about a game of billiard-fives? Do you play billiard-fives, Miss Cherrington?”

Hilda said, a little shortly, that she hadn't played any game since she left school.

“Would you like to learn?” asked Dick.

“You couldn't ask her to play that,” Anne interposed. “And after dinner, too. It's an appallingly painful game, Miss Cherrington, and tears your hands to ribbons.”

“Miss Cherrington wouldn't mind a little thing like that,” said Dick, and to Eustace's astonishment he heard Hilda say that she supposed she could try.

“Splendid,” said Dick, before anyone could get a word in. “Now who else shall we have? Anne plays, she's a dab at the game. She carries a most useful right hook and her cheating is superb. Only we can't play on the same side, because we irritate each other. It's my fault really.”

“I don't like being given so much advice,” said Anne. Eustace noticed that Anne seemed to keep her end up with Dick better than anyone else did.

“Miss Cherrington won't mind me giving her advice,” said Dick, “because she says she's a learner. Now who would like to be the fourth?” He looked inquiringly from Antony to Eustace. Eustace was conscious of a longing for invisibility.

“Come on, Antony,” said Dick. “I know you can play. I remember in the old days how dangerous you were with those fairy taps at the top of the table. Your short game used to be wonderful, subtle to a degree. You always were an expert at infighting.”

Antony seldom declined a challenge addressed to his social conscience.

“Very well, Dick,” he said, with a glance at Eustace, “I'm ready for you.”

“Good man,” said Dick. “We'll leave Eustace to look after Aunt Nelly. He can talk to her about books. But of course they're free to cut in whenever they like. We may easily have a casualty. I shall rely on Miss Cherrington with her medical experience to bind up our wounds. The First Aid Post is in the housekeeper's room—we pass it on the way. That's where the stretcher-cases are always brought. Good-bye, Aunt Nelly—you both look as if you wished you were coming with us.”

Eustace signalled to Hilda with his eyebrow, but in vain.

Shepherded by Dick's tall figure, they crossed the floor, a ragged group, and the door closed on them.

Lady Nelly turned her face up to the solitary Eustace, and he found himself sitting beside her on the sofa. Of his former visit to Anchorstone the impression that stuck in his mind most vividly was the plenitude of sofas. There were in fact four. This was the smallest; it had wings like an ear-chair, and only held two.

“He likes getting his own way, doesn't he?” said Lady Nelly. “But I don't quarrel with the arrangement.”

Eustace felt that this civility demanded another, but it would not take shape in his mind, because that forum was already occupied by another preoccupation.

“Is billiard-fives a really dangerous game?” he asked.

Lady Nelly laughed.

“Were you thinking of your poor sister's fingers? No, not really dangerous, though I dare say Dick will make it as dangerous as he can.”

“I shouldn't like her to get damaged,” said Eustace, whose fears could sometimes be charmed away by the repeated pooh-poohings of an older person.

“Oh, I'm sure he'll take the greatest care of her. You'll smile, but I played the game once. It's stopping the hard ones that hurts. She'll be playing with him, so they won't come to her.”

Eustace had the comfortable sensation that he need not be anxious about Hilda.

“But what a lovely girl your sister is,” Lady Nelly went on. “I don't wonder you don't want to see her with a black eye. You must be very proud of her. Why has nobody told me about her?”

Something in the tone of Lady Nelly's voice made Eustace ask:

“Has anyone told you about me?”

Lady Nelly smiled. Her wide face had more firmness in it than one expected from her rather vague, dreamy manner. Her features might have been called blunt, for all their finish; to Eustace they never seemed quite visible, some effluence of her personality lay over them like a ground mist, and sometimes her spirit seemed to retreat, leaving her face untenanted save by its beauty; then her smile, which was never twice alike, gave her back to herself. Now she was answering his question:

“Why, naturally. I've heard a great deal about you from Antony. But I won't embarrass you by telling you what he said.”

“He told me about you, too,” said Eustace.

“How curious you make me. Dear Antony! What did he say?”

Eustace was suddenly overwhelmed by a vision of all the things that must have been said to Lady Nelly—witty compliments flashed at her by men of letters, tender compliments whispered by Edwardian gallants, standing behind her, bending over her chair; stately compliments uttered by kings on their thrones, and acknowledged by Lady Nelly with an inclination of the head or even a curtsy.

There was a whisper of voices from a hundred grand or brilliant or intimate occasions in the pre-war past; but none of them was audible, not one gave Eustace a lead.

“Well,” she said, “was it too bad for you to tell me?”

The idea of inventing something occurred to Eustace, to be instantly vetoed by his conscience. If only he could remember what Antony had said! Antony belonged to Lady Nelly's world; he understood its conventions, and even if the remark, on another tongue, did not sound quite right, still Eustace would not be held responsible for it. But what
had
Antony said? Something about the Staveleys not approving of Lady Nelly? That wouldn't do. Something about her husband having drunk himself to death? That would be worse. That everyone adored her? That would be much too intimate. He remembered a phrase and snatched at it.

“He said it was you who put the Staveleys on the map!”

The corners of Lady Nelly's eyes began to crinkle, her wide mouth grew wider, and she laughed and laughed.

“Don't think I'm laughing at you,” she said. “But it is so funny. Did he really say that? What a strange expression—I never heard it before. But I'm afraid that my respected in-laws wouldn't agree.”

“He said no one had ever heard of the Staveleys until you married Mr. Frederick Staveley,” said Eustace, encouraged by his success, and hoping he was not being too disloyal to his host and hostess.

Lady Nelly laughed again. Recovering, “You must forgive me,” she said. “Only no one ever called him Frederick. I don't think I've heard the name till now. You mustn't think me heartless,” she went on with a bewilderingly quick change to seriousness. “But it was a long time ago. Poor Freddie. You could hardly have known him,” she went on, still in her mind defending herself from a charge of callousness that Eustace was far from bringing. For a moment she looked extremely sad, and Eustace began to feel that he had spoilt her evening, that he was a cad, an egregious ass who didn't know how to talk to a stranger, above all to a woman of beauty and fashion and fascination, and that he ought to apologise or sound an immediate retreat to the billiard-room—anything to rid her of the incubus of his presence.

“No,” she said suddenly, and the negative, though it was not so meant, seemed to be an answer to his thoughts. “No, I was thinking about what you said—what Antony said. It's all such ancient history now. When I married Freddie he hadn't a penny—I mean, about a thousand a year.”

She raised her eyebrows, and her amethyst-grey eyes, resigned and sad but with a question in them, sought Eustace's, as though expecting sympathy for her union with this beggarly income. He, quickly revising a life-time's training not to talk about money with a stranger, but unable to think of a thousand a year except as riches, gazed at her in doubt, and said at last:

“It doesn't seem very much.”

“No indeed,” said Lady Nelly. “But Freddie was so good-looking. Not quite with the distinction John has, but romantic, rather like Dick. It was the coal-mine in Derbyshire that really put them on the map, as Antony calls it, not me.”

“Are they very rich now?” asked Eustace reverently.

“Oh no, just comfortably off. This is a nice little place, isn't it?”

“This?”

Eustace felt he could not have heard aright. What did she mean? He gazed round the big room whose corners were hardly visible now that the top lights were silenced.

“Oh, I don't mean this monstrous mausoleum of heraldic tuft-hunting,” said Lady Nelly. “No, the house itself. It's got charm, don't you think? Big houses are so overpowering.”

Desperately Eustace tried to adjust himself to Lady Nelly's standards.

“I suppose they are.... But aren't the Staveleys a very old family?” He assumed that a member of one old family would be interested in the antiquity of another. But to his surprise Lady Nelly, like Antony, did not seem to have given the matter much consideration.

“I suppose they are,” she said vaguely. “Yes, of course they are. Much older than ours, for instance. I'm afraid we were only Elizabethan profiteers and land-grabbers, mushrooms compared with the Staveleys. In that sense they've always been on the map. Are you interested in genealogy, Mr. Cherrington? I believe it's a fascinating study. I've a cousin who spends his life at it.”

“I seem to like the idea of anything old,” said Eustace, hoping that this simple-sounding admission would clear him of the charge of snobbery.

“Then you must come and see Whaplode,” said Lady Nelly. “I shall be most happy to show it to you. The estate wasn't entailed and my father took no interest in his Tasmanian cousins, so he left it to me. It's only mine for my life, so you must hurry up. But I'm not sure the house would be old enough for your austere requirements,” she continued teasingly. “It's a great barn of a place, but I'm afraid most of it only goes back to the eighteenth century.”

“Oh, but I should love to see it, Lady Eleanor,” cried Eustace, feeling that so magnificent an invitation excused, nay demanded, the use of her Christian name.

But to his discomfiture she burst out laughing.

“Well, you shall,” she said. “But for Heaven's sake don't call me Lady Eleanor, call me anything you like, but not that. Nobody has ever called me that. I shouldn't answer to it—I shouldn't know who you were talking to.”

“I'm so sorry,” muttered Eustace, wishing the earth would swallow him. Not knowing where to look, he turned his eyes upwards. The massed insignia of the Staveleys returned his scrutiny with a cold and hostile stare.

Lady Nelly was still laughing.

“Don't worry,” she said. “I shall always remember you as the one person who took my name seriously, as it ought to be taken. Eleanor sounds so distinguished and mediæval—I think I shall ask everyone to call me Eleanor in future. Only then I should have to live up to it, and be an Eleanor. Do you think names influence their owners, Mr. Cherrington?”

Eustace wondered if Hilda would have been different had she been called, say, Joy.

“To me, it's the owners who influence their names,” he said.

“In the case of strong personalities, perhaps they do,” said Lady Nelly. “But all the same, a name has its own character, I think, and some people seem well named, and others not. May I know what your name is, Mr. Cherrington?”

Eustace was seized with bashfulness. Every kind of inhibition and taboo leapt up, demanding that his name should be kept secret. Not only that, it seemed a poor, wretched name, too silly and insipid to repeat. Oh, to have been called Valentine or Horatio. But Lady Nelly was waiting; she must be astonished at the time it took him to answer a straightforward question.

“It's Eustace, I'm afraid,” he said.

“Why afraid?” said Lady Nelly. “It's a charming name, and suits you, if I may be allowed to say so. Of course now I remember, Dick called you Eustace.” She paused, as though to enjoy the sound of his name on her own lips. “But somehow he made it sound different. Or am I being fanciful?”

“I like it better the way you say it,” said Eustace in a low voice.

“Then will you object if I call you by it?” asked Lady Nelly.

“No,” muttered Eustace. “Please do.” He looked at her a moment. In looking at anyone there is usually some obstacle that meets and mars one's vision, turning it back on itself—a hair out of place, an unresponsive line in the attitude, an unsympathetic or dead patch somewhere. Eustace could see no flaw in this crystal. He turned away, his face inadequate to what he felt. But just then the door opened, letting in a rattle and a tinkle which rapidly increased in volume, and he saw Crosby coming towards them, with a footman close behind, each carrying a tray loaded with glasses, bottles, jugs, siphons and decanters, a sparkling array.