Late and Soon (20 page)

“Don't you want me to?”

He hesitated.

“Well, no. In a way I don't. I think you'd find them impossible, and that it would distress you. Arlette, of course, is different. She'll always be a part of my life, and I want you to know each other.”

“But you don't want her to come to Coombe?”

“I don't, sweetheart. If it was just you, it might be different. But you have people coming and going — and servants—”

“Oh, Rory! Those two little village girls?”

“They're nice little girls, I know,” he conceded, “but English servants aren't like French ones, or Irish ones
either. A real Irish servant is like one of the family. Old Maggie Dolan, who does all the work except what Nellie does herself, gives her opinion freely, I'd have you know, on anything and everybody. Nellie and Arlette very often sit with her, evenings, in the kitchen and she thinks nothing of bawling to Nellie up the stairs if she wants her for anything. It's a different sort of relation altogether.”

“It's probably a much better one than ours, which is artificial. But think of Madeleine —
she's
not an English servant.”

“Madeleine would be shocked, at your having Arlette as a step-daughter. She's a kind, nice woman — I can see that — and she'd like Arlette and understand her on her own merits — but not as one of your family.”

Valentine reflected, grievedly and rather sadly, on what he was saying.

At last she asked:

“Does it matter much? Supposing that all you've just said is perfectly true, need it make any difference to us?”

“Not so long as we talk it out, and don't just shirk discussion, and ignore the whole problem. Does that frighten you, dearest?”

“I think it does, a little. You see, Rory, I've always lived amongst people who do, deliberately, ignore a great many things. I've taken it for granted that one should.”

“You have,” he agreed. “Just as you've taken it for granted, I think, that if anything hurts you or makes you unhappy, you mustn't show it.”

Valentine smiled faintly.

“It's the conventional English tradition, isn't it?”

“It is, and I'm not saying there isn't something fine and good about it. But not between two people who love each other as you and I do, Val. We've
got
to be honest with one another. If I hurt you — God knows I won't want to, but I probably will — you'll have to let me talk it out with you.”

“Do you mean, if you were ever unfaithful to me?”

I don't, darling. I've no right to say it, but I believe I'll be faithful to you always. And that's a thing I've never felt about anybody else in the world.”

She murmured her response in a word of endearment, and they were interrupted by the service.

“Tell me why you said you'd probably hurt me,” she asked, a little later.

“Because we're human beings,” Lonergan answered sadly. “Because it's like that. Even the people who love each other most are bound to hurt one another sometimes in little things. But it's all right — I mean, it doesn't spoil anything really — if they're always able to talk it out together.”

Valentine thought of her own instinctive reaction to pain. Even in the last forty-eight hours she had experienced it consciously — in the pangs of acute jealousy that she suffered in thinking not only of Arlette, but of Arlette's dead mother — and had hidden it.

Quite suddenly, she found that she was smiling.

“We ought never to have been separated, that time in Rome. We ought to have been together ever since our youth, Rory.”

“Ah, how right you are!”

It startled her when she found that they had almost finished their luncheon and that Lonergan was telling the waiter to bring coffee to the table.

“It's better than the hall, or lounge, or whatever they call it,” he explained. “Though it's absurd that I should be trying to tell you how I adore you, here, in public, and in these surroundings. Tell me, love, will we be able to be somewhere this evening, by ourselves?”

“Oh, Rory, I forgot to tell you. My sister-in-law — Humphrey's sister Venetia — has telephoned and she wants to come to Coombe for to-night and to-morrow. She's bringing a young man called Spurway with her. He knows Primrose, I think.”

“They'll be there when I get back, then?”

“I'm afraid so, yes.”

Lonergan emitted a thoughtful, ejaculatory Damn! but that he was also preoccupied with another idea was evident and he added immediately:

“Have you seen Primrose this morning?”

Valentine told him that she had, and that Primrose had spoken to her without any unkindness.

“But I think she wants to go back to London. She doesn't want to stay on at home.”

“Will you and Primrose say anything to one another before she goes?”

“It will depend on her,” said Valentine rather faintly. “I don't really know how much she realizes what's happened to us. Last night I thought she did.”

“So did I.”

“Rory, why don't I mind more that you've been in love with Primrose? I ought to feel it a most terrible thing, that would put a barrier between us for ever. But I can't feel that. I suppose it would be different if I didn't know that she's had other affairs.”

“I think it would. You see, dearest, Primrose hasn't either loved me, or even
thought
that she loved me. She's very realistic. It's one of the things I admire about her.”

Valentine meditated.

“Do you know, I believe that I do too? It's hurt me often, that realism of hers, but I do admire it.”

“You've got it too, in a different form. You're honest with yourself.”

Valentine felt tears rising into her eyes, partly because she found his words moving and reassuring, and partly at the remembrance of the immense gulf between herself and her daughter that neither admiration nor realism nor courage could ever bridge. She told Lonergan of her conversation with Jess, and of how Jess had said: “What
do
individual people matter?”

“She said it in such complete sincerity, Rory. Jess
doesn't ever pose. She truly sees it like that.”

“I know,” he answered. “It's a point of view that's inherent in her generation. It isn't in ours, and we shan't ever acquire it. At least, people like you and me won't.”

“I suppose not.”

“The conflict of individual souls
does
matter,” he insisted. “It matters immensely. I see it as you do, Val.”

And, looking at her, he repeated her own words of a few minutes earlier:

“You and I ought always to have been together — ever since the days when we were young and fell in love with one another, and had to let them separate us.”

Lonergan drove Valentine back to Coombe just before the hour of her Red Cross meeting. As the ancient car bucketed over the ruts and pot-holes of the drive, they passed two girls riding bicycles, and a little way further on, a straggling procession of elderly and middle-aged women plodding along sedately and in silence.

Valentine waved to them, and they smiled and nodded at her in return.

“Is that your work-party?”

“Yes. They're mostly farmers' wives, and one or two of the tradespeople. The two girls on bicycles are the doctor's daughters. They come very regularly, although they're terribly busy, both of them.”

“Any others?”

“A neighbour of ours, Lady Fields, who lives in rather a nice house on the other side of the hill. She's got a P.G. with her, now — a Mrs. Dalwood whose husband is abroad — and she generally brings her.”

“It's good of you to have them.”

It seemed to Valentine that Lonergan was purposely seeking to keep any inflection out of his deep and musical voice, and the thought brought with it the conviction that he felt bewildered, and out of sympathy with the limited
and parochial futilities that made up so much of her life.

“Do you think it's all very useless?” she suggested rather timidly.

“Darling, no. It's not that. It's just that I don't understand. I've never seen that kind of life. It's one of the things that frightens me — all these interests and responsibilities that you've built up for yourself in the years. Will I ever be able to understand them?”

“Won't you, Rory?”

“Ah, I will. You'll make me understand everything. We've got to be together, always, for whatever time may be left to us. We'll find a way.”

The warmth and colour had come back to his voice again, and his eyes smiled at her.

Her love flamed within her, responding to his mercurial ardour. But the parting words that they exchanged on the steps of Coombe, although they chimed like bells in her consciousness all the afternoon, could only partly drown the echo of his earlier words:

“It's just that I don't understand. I've never seen that kind of life. It's one of the things that frightens me….”

The cutting-out, the stitching and folding, had all taken place to the customary accompaniment of disconnected conversation that always circled round the same topics: the war, news of those who were on active service, and domestic difficulties at home.

At four o'clock Madeleine brought in coffee and biscuits, and the workers, as usual, protested and exclaimed, and then praised the coffee that had, they knew, been made by Madeleine. They all exchanged experiences over the difficulty of obtaining this or that commodity.

Presently they were all gone.

Valentine went round the house to see whether the
black-out had been properly done. In Lonergan's room she paused for an instant.

He had brought scarcely any personal possessions, and she felt sure that he owned very few. There were no photographs and only two or three books, all of them old and shabby-looking, neatly stacked on the bedside table.

Shall we ever share an intimate, everyday life together? thought Valentine.

She went away, to the other rooms, with the question still unanswered in her mind.

He's an artist, she thought, and a man of forty-eight who's lived his own sort of life always. He's afraid that I should want him to adapt himself to mine. And yet he's afraid, too, that I could never fit into his. Perhaps I never could. But I love him so. I'd give up anything in the world for him. Only that isn't any good. A true companionship can't be founded on a one-sided relinquishment. Not the kind of companionship that Rory and I were meant to have. He said,” We'll find a way.” How can we?

The Red Room had been got ready. There was even a coal fire burning in the grate, and Jess had placed chrysanthemums on the dressing-table.

With the two officers' rooms already filled, only a very small bedroom that faced north had been available for Venetia's Hughie Spurway.

All the rooms in the house would be occupied, thought Valentine.

It was past six o'clock when the sound of a motor horn roused the two dogs to frenzied barking, the General to shouted maledictions at them both, and Jess to striding, slamming activity at the front door.

Valentine, already in her soft, shabby, ageless black dress, waited by the fire. Her slim fingers automatically disentangled the long silken fringes of the Chinese shawl caught in the back of her chair.

She already felt faintly nervous. Venetia's flawless
armour of self-confidence, her complete non-recognition of any standards other than her own, had always frightened Valentine. Humphrey, neither liking nor disliking his only sister, had never minded them in the least. He had, indeed, had something of the same impenetrable complacency in his own character but in him it had been tempered by more kindliness and less astuteness.

But, as usual, when Venetia came into the hall and was greeted by her sister-in-law, Valentine was primarily struck by her beauty.

Impossible to say of Venetia Rockingham at fifty-one: She is
still
a pretty woman. Hers was the timeless beauty ensured by small and perfectly-formed bones, brilliant and deeply-set dark eyes beneath a broad, white brow, and a shapely nose and mouth that recalled certain portraits of the Umbrian school of painting in their mingling of sensuality, warmth and an arrogance that yet contrived to be dignified.

The pale-gold of her hair showed no trace of artifice, and if the golden gloss that Valentine had admired twenty-five years earlier had long since faded, the soft, unlustrous waves now framing the clearly - moulded, classically-spaced features only served to emphasize Venetia's ageless loveliness.

The slim lines of her figure possessed all the fluidity and grace that suggest youth, whilst actually far more often achieved by the poise of maturity and the assurance derived from wealth, beautiful clothes and the ability to wear them without self-consciousness.

She was followed into the hall by Hughie Spurway.

At a first glance, it was possible only to note that he undoubtedly belonged to the group so often and so angrily defined before the war by General Levallois as “Venetia's pansies”. He was large-eyed, haggard, good-looking, in spite of prematurely thinning dark hair, but with all the nervous and agitating mannerisms of the neurotic.

“Darling, it's too angelic of you to have us like this,”
Lady Rockingham cried. “How are you? Reggie — lovely to see you again. Where's darling Primrose? Hughie, you know Primrose of course. This is her mother, Lady Arbell, who was a friend of
your
mother's somewhere in the dark ages when they were infants and I was already an elderly married woman. Reggie, this is Hughie Spurway — General Levallois.”

Her manner and vocabulary were, strangely, still those of the Edwardian hostess.

Valentine always felt that it was really that elaborate social artificiality of Venetia's that, unknown to herself, and in spite of the almost transatlantic modernity with which she conducted the machinery of existence, divorced her irrevocably from youth.