Friends and Lovers (8 page)

Penny was very subdued and very polite for the rest of the evening.

*I wonder if Penelope is catching something,” Mrs. Lorrimer confided to her father, as the girls at last went upstairs to bed, and she prepared to follow them.

“Probably just thinking. It is a painful process for anyone. Good night, Mary. And don’t worry, my dear.”

But Dr. MacLntyre, as he lifted his pipe from the ashtray and stretched his legs before the fire, which had been lit against the chilly night air, was puzzling over Penny, too. Why had she paid that special visit to him this evening? London ostensibly. But David Bosworth indirectly? Stuff and nonsense, he thought irritably. And then he tried to imagine how he had felt and thought and acted when he was nineteen. But those years were too far away.

And it was only in moments like those he had experienced this afternoon—Bosworth’s energy, his revolt against the state of acceptance; Penny’s vitality and warmth—that he could have the fleeting sensation of remembering exact emotions in his own youth. As if each year dropped a thin veil over the preceding year, and as you got farther away from the years of youth the accumulation of veils became a thickness substantial enough to conceal and hide. Only in certain moments, when some memory stirred, was that thickness slit through. Suddenly, and only for a brief interval.

“There I am,” you said, looking at youth. And then you looked at yourself and said, “No.” And you added, “There I was.” And so you let the slit in the veils close again, and let your thoughts keep the even pace of your body. The veils, some bright, some sombre, fell together; and they lost all particular colour and merged into a gentle grey.

Dr. MacLntyre looked at the photograph on the mantelpiece. You’ll never be a philosopher, he told himself: you were too happy with her.

He smiled as he looked up at his wife. “Weren’t we, lass?” he said.

Chapter Six.

TALK FOR A GREY DAY.

The Lodge at Loch Innish was a pugnacious place. You felt it could face any odds—Norsemen, raiding clans, winter storms, or the yearly invasion of its grouse moors. Even its recent embellishments of lawn and driveway, of tennis-court and rose-garden, could not alter its essential function. It was the guardian of the road which led from the deep, narrow sea loch to the scattered crofts and villages lying inland.

When the mists hung over the loch, blotting out the sharp mountains falling steeply towards its dark waters, this feeling of watchful loneliness increased. With the security of foot-thick stone walls around you, and a solid roof over your head, you could even take a peculiar pleasure in watching the swirling mists, for it was always pleasant to have your comfort and security emphasized. And if you had work to do the days of mist were welcome; for there was no temptation to go climbing or fishing or swimming, or to have a game of tennis, or to lie among the heather where the air was warm and sweet. Sweeter and cleaner, David thought, than anything he had ever felt around him, so that it became a conscious pleasure just to be alive, just to be able to breathe.

To-day was a day of mist, but David found, to his great irritation, that he was thoroughly unsettled. Here he was standing at the window again, looking out at the half-formed shapes and ghostly outlines of a world which had disappeared and depended on human memory for its existence. This morning he had thought that the usual daily routine would occupy this mind of his, and that the attack of gloom which had descended on him, very much as the mist had descended on the loch, would clear.

But to-day an attack of restlessness had spread through the Lodge.

Tea was over, yet the boys were certainly not doing much work, judging by the racket they were making in the music-room. George had settled philosophically in the more comfortable chair by the lighted fire in the library, with a pile of magazines on the small table at his elbow, although he actually had had enough good intentions to have a copy of The Greek Commonwealth lying open on his knees And David had spent the last half-hour reading and rereading the same page in Aristotle’s Politics, and then had riser from his chair and started walking round the library shelves.

He had picked out a book here and there, glanced at it, pul it back into its place in its row. Well-filled rows, too, nol only in number, but in choice.

The library had been stockec by the yard, but adequately, thanks to the advice Lad; Fenton-Stevens had taken from the Times Book Club. Guests marooned by the rain would find plenty to read. David had been surprised and delighted when he had first arrived, and had blessed Lady Fenton-Stevens’s advisers. It wasn’t toe cruel to admit that she couldn’t have made this choice her self. She probably had not read ten books in the last ter years.

She knew all about the books being published, oi course—enough to make an amusing phrase in conversation But to read them completely was a very different matter “One is so frightfully busy, you know,” she had munnurec vaguely to David last Christmas, just after she had returnee from Paris and was about to set out for St. Moritz.

There they were, all in their neat rows: Faulkner, Mann Proust, Stendhal, Hemingway, Morgan, Remains … Practically virgin, too: David had read them with a paper-kniff beside him, scanning a favourite page in those he knew seizing upon those he had not been able to buy or borrow. Ii was comfortable, pleasant, to sit in the library beside the dying fire once George had trundled off to bed and the boy were also out of sight and hearing. It was more than pleasant all the tutoring and coaching and justification for his existence were over for the day. He could spend a couple of hours here in peace, and take his choice in Stendhal 01 Dorothy Sayers, in Tolstoy or Wodehouse, before going u{ through the sleeping house to his own room. He hadn’t beer reduced, like Dr. Johnson, to reading a History of Birmingham This afternoon, however, even the choice of books hadn’ helped him.

Here he was, standing at this window, looking out at a wet, grey curtain. He must find something to read He left the window and went back to the bookshelves. Hi pulled out A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man an opened it at random.

“Pride and hope and desire like crushec herbs in his heart sent up va pours of maddening inc ens before the eyes of his mind.” David grimaced and turned over to another page impatiently. It always was unfair, he reminded himself, to take a sentence out of context: the easy, the cheap, way to embarrass an author. Ah, here was what he was looking for … “Now I call that friendly, don’t you? Yes, I liked her to-day. A little or much? Don’t know. I liked her, and it seemed a new feeling to me.

Then, in that case, all the rest, all that I thought I thought and all that I felt I felt, all the rest before now, in fact . 0, give it up, old chap!

Sleep it off!” … Yes, David thought savagely, sleep it off. He closed the book. Bitter advice, which Joyce himself refused merely by stating it.

Only those who had never let themselves be possessed by thoughts and feelings, only those could sleep it off.

He glanced over at George. George, now, could sleep off anything.

“I say, David, could you stop wandering round? Damned if I can concentrate,” George said.

“Sorry.”

Something in David’s voice made Fenton-Stevens twist round in his chair to look at him. George dropped his book and rose, upsetting the tankard which he had placed on the floor near his feet.

“Damnation,” he said, and pulled his handkerchief out of the cuff of his sleeve, and dropped it over the spreading pool of beer.

“Lucky there wasn’t much left,” he said.

“Revolting mess.” He crossed over to the window.

“Nothing much to see out there.”

“No.”

“Come over to the fire. Have some beer. Chuck that book away. I don’t feel like working much, either. It is difficult today, when we had all the arrangements made for that picnic on Inchnamurren. Besides, we worked enough yesterday to make up for any old day off the chain. So let’s enjoy ourselves. Come along.”

They went back to the fireplace together. George kicked the sodden handkerchief out of sight behind the pile of logs on the broad, flagstoned hearth. He threw a chunk of wood on the low embers of the fire.

“That will cheer the place up,” he said.

“God, imagine having to sit before a fire in July. We might as well be in Greenland.”

David rested his hand against the carved stone panel above the fireplace and stared down at the flickering small tongues of flame lapping round the logs. Then he became aware of George’s puzzled interest. He searched for something to say. The noise from the music-room was now at the hilarious stage: Chris and his cousin were happily boring holes off-centre on some records, and playing them from that new axis.

David said, “How many records do you think those blockheads have ruined? Or doesn’t it matter?”

George thought for a moment, and then moved quickly towards the door.

“If they’ve touched any of mine I’ll knock their brains out. What they have of them.”

When he returned to the room he looked pleased with his persuasive efforts.

“They’ve decided to go down to visit Captain Ma clean cottage, so we shall;‘h ave peace for a couple of hours. The Washboard Beaters fetd Red Nichols and the new Gershwin are still intact. They were experimenting on Wagner, thank God.”

“N01 the Meistersinger or Tristan, I hope.”

“No, they were concentrating on the Valkyrie and the Rhine maidens.”

“Symbolic, perhaps.”

George looked at him blankly, and then laughed.

“Revolt against women? You are probably right. Chris is at the vulnerable stage, as you call it. If you stayed for the Twelfth, when all the girls arrive on the scene, you’d be amused by his contortions. He is fascinated by them and he is afraid of them, all at the same time. Oh, chuck away that book and draw your chair up, David. It isn’t a good working day.

Pity about the picnic. And the Lorrimers leave tomorrow, so it is off altogether. Probably would have been an awful bore, anyway. Flies in the tea and midges down the back of your neck.” David said nothing. He was wondering if Penelope Lorrimer felt any of this strange disappointment which had angered him all day. And then he reminded himself once more that she had probably forgotten all about him by this time.

Girls, if you could believe what you read—and how else were you able to find out about them when they all looked as if life were a very simple affair? —girls did not brood over what might be or what might not. Perhaps they did not know what they wanted out of life when they were young. And that was a pity, because when they were young they had poetry in their life: they had intensity and emotion. Later they lost that warmth: they so often became more like a passage of elegant prose, amusing or thoughtful, but always with the poetry in them well under control. So well controlled sometimes that it had died. Which was more than a pity.

“Penny for them,” George said. Then, as David looked startled and did not reply, he repeated, “I said a penny for your thoughts.”

David drew a deep breath. If he had met any other pretty girl last week would he now be behaving in this fantastic way? Possibly, for the island was a magic place and he had been bewitched. Yet, probably not. He had seen plenty of pretty girls. But last week he had seen Penny.

“I was thinking about a topic which men never discuss,” he said.

George looked startled.

“Just what could that be?”

“Women.”

George stopped worrying about David. This was the old David back again, true to form.

“I was thinking,” David continued, ‘about Chris and his agonies in sex. He hasn’t learned to hide them yet. You and I have. But that doesn’t mean we have lost all our uncertainties or fears. We are still afraid of being laughed at. Because, I suppose, we feel we are choosing by emotion, and we have been told often enough that that is wrong. Yet, frankly, I don’t see how else we can choose: meeting a girl you like is an emotional experience, isn’t it? Reason has nothing to do with it unless you are a fish like individual. At a time when we have enough hot blood to enjoy life fully we are surrounded by a conspiracy of age to settle the rules and regulations as if love were a game or a business. It isn’t. It’s a state of being. With it you’re alive. Without it you exist.” “Here!” George said, in alarm. He had never heard David talk this way before: he was too damned serious, even if he kept a smile on his lips and a light tone in his voice.

“I say, David, you aren’t still worrying about Eleanor, are you? As her brother I can frankly say that she isn’t worth much worry.”

“Good God, no!” David was vehement enough to be believed this time. It was true. Eleanor had now become a period piece. Last night he had even torn up the verses which he had written to celebrate his disillusionment and unhappiness over that affair. Last night he had read them, and their imitation.

Verlaine had only made him acutely embarrassed. Tripe garnished with the brains of calf-love. It had been a lucky escape for him when Eleanor had decided there was more fun in the world than one man could offer. Eleanor, that little nitwit?

“Good God, no,” he repeated.

“Oh, she isn’t a bad scout really,” George said, rising automatically to the defence of his family.

“But she wouldn’t have done at all. You were too serious about it.”

That’s the trouble.” David wasn’t thinking of Eleanor Fenton-Stevens now.

“When do you know whether you should be serious or not serious about a girl?

You don’t, in fact. Either you have to pass her by altogether or take the chance of being serious.”

“Well, don’t take being serious about a girl too seriously,” George suggested.

“After all, a man knows he can’t marry until his career is well established.

But there’s no ban on following your fancy when you are still at the unmarriageable stage.” “Thanks,” David said dryly, ‘but I’ve no taste for camp-followers.

That has about as much satisfaction as pouring your favourite wine into a public drinking-cup. Or helping yourself to strawberries and cream on a plate still greasy from bacon and eggs. How would you enjoy food served that way, George?”