Late and Soon (25 page)

“Yes, Jess is to be told, and uncle Reggie and everyone, I suppose. Because I had to tell Venetia.”

“Good God, all this talking and discussing,” said Primrose, her tone wearily contemptuous. “I should have thought it was your own show and not anybody else's.”

Valentine, in her mingled confusion and relief, felt unable to reply.

She thought that it was not possible for her, at her age and with the involved responsibilities of a lifetime behind her, to break all her chains and take her own way.

Primrose would have denied that scornfully.

Perhaps, even, Primrose was right.

Rory will know, thought Valentine, and the feeling that she could trust him as she had never been able to
trust anybody yet, gave her courage.

“I'd like to tell Jess to-night,” she said.

“She's only fooling about in Madeleine's sitting-room,” Primrose said.

She went to the door and Valentine heard her calling up the short flight of stairs that led to Madeleine's little room.

“Hallo!” shouted Jess in return.

I ought to tell them not to make so much noise, thought Valentine, but she said nothing, and presently Jess clattered down the stairs and came into the schoolroom.

“D'you want me, mummie?”

There was something that hinted, so faintly as to be scarcely perceptible, at suspicion in her tone. Valentine wondered what she expected to hear.

Primrose opened her cigarette-case, found it empty and swore — coldly and unemphatically.

She glanced obliquely at Jess, standing by the door in her short printed silk frock that was both too short and too tight, her light flaxen hair tousled as though she had been romping, her hands on her hips in an attitude that vaguely suggested defiance.

“What's up?” she demanded in abrupt, childlike phraseology.

“God, let's not make a thing out of it,” Primrose said. “It'll be all the same a hundred years hence, anyway.”

“What?”

Primrose shrugged her shoulders and looked at Valentine.

With that inescapable, unerring intuition that brings only pain where love is completely one-sided, Valentine knew that Primrose would have told Jess the truth then and there if she could have brought herself to refer to her mother directly. She was inhibited from doing so because there was no name by which she could endure to call her.

“Jess, Colonel Lonergan has asked me to marry him. I've said I will.”

“Oh,” said Jess.

It was no exclamation of surprise. It held reflectiveness, and a certain hard young disapproval. After a moment's pause she added:

“How frightfully funny. I mean funny-peculiar.”

“Shall you— You won't mind, will you? “Valentine asked.

The vitality that had moved her in Venetia's room was ebbing from her so rapidly that she could scarcely choose her own words. They seemed to fall from her, weak and unmeaning, of their own accord.

Jess replied almost as Primrose had done.

“Why should I? It isn't anything to do with me, anyway. I'll be gone any day now and after the war I'm going to get a job. It's entirely your own show, mummie. Uncle Reggie will be in a rage, though, won't he?”

“Perhaps. I don't know.”

“Gosh, I bet he will. He loathes Irish people, doesn't he? When will you get married?”

“I think very soon,” Valentine answered, but the words as she spoke them carried no conviction to her at all.

“Gosh!” Jess repeated.

“Let's not go on,” Primrose suggested. “All this talking things over.”

“I'm just going,” Valentine said.

She stood up and found that her knees were shaking and that she was very cold. She felt suddenly afraid of fainting.

Jess was looking at her, without unkindness and without kindness. Her fresh, open face wore merely a rather thoughtful expression, as though she were impersonally pondering a new idea of no great essential significance.

Primrose was examining the tips of her fingers and there was an air of faint distaste about the arrogant lines of
her mouth, and her narrowed eyes.

They had nothing more to say to her, and there was nothing more that Valentine could say to them.

She moved slowly to the door, resisting the impulse to steady herself against the shabby pieces of furniture. “Good-night,” she said, and her voice sounded forlorn and unreal through the strange buzzing noises in her ears.

“'Night,” said Jess, with relief in her tone.

Primrose said nothing.

Valentine went out of the room, and shut the door, then stood quite still in the passage, unwilling for the moment to move further.

When her senses cleared again, she slowly went along the passage, uncertain where she wanted to go.

“It's all right,” said Lonergan's voice.” It's all right, it's all
right.”

He was, miraculously, beside her — his hand grasping her cold ones and his arm steadying her.

“What is it, dearest? What have they been doing to you, to make you look like that?”

Valentine's breast lifted in a short sob of pure relief. “It's nothing, now I'm with you again. I had to tell Primrose and Jess, Rory, about us.”

“Why did you have to, darling?”

“Because Venetia knows and she'd have done it if I hadn't.”

“The bitch,” said Lonergan coolly.” What has it to do with her, I'd like to know. Were the girls not kind to you, love?”

Valentine smiled.

“Primrose said it was the first time I'd ever said anything realistic to her — when I told her that I knew you and she had been lovers. It somehow made her kinder than I'd expected her to be.”

“I understand that. There's a sort of nobility about
Primrose, the way she'll accept anything provided it's a really true thing. It's what one likes best in her. Was Jess all right?”

“I think she felt embarrassed.”

Lonergan laughed indulgently.

“She'll get over it, the nice, poor child! I suppose she feels we've each got one foot in the grave, the pair of us, and should be thinking about making a holy death and nothing else besides. She'll get over it.”

“They both said that it had nothing to do with them, because they wouldn't be living here any more.”

“Neither will we.”

He spoke the words casually and matter-of-factly, but Valentine was startled by them and a profound feeling of dismay invaded her.

She instinctively and at once checked her first impulse to speak of this and stood quite still, leaning against him.

“What is it?” he asked.

“It's nothing. Nothing that I can tell you about now.”

“Then you'll tell me another time. We're not going to have anything that can't be said between us, darling. Will you be coming downstairs again later, or are you too tired? I came to get some papers I want Sedgewick to look at — we'll be through with them in about twenty minutes. Would you be able to come to the little office then?”

“Yes.”

“Thank God,” said Lonergan with a grave simplicity that gave to the words a quality of reverence.

“Rory, is Reggie still downstairs?”

“He is.”

“I think I'll speak to him at once. Now that Venetia knows, and the children.”

“If you think so, sweetheart. You know best. I suppose they've all got to be told, the way you'd think it was any of their dam' business instead of being simply yours and mine. Tell me, will there be a lot of old talk
about this — everyone telling you what to do, or not to do, and giving you all sorts of advice?”

“Perhaps. It won't make any difference.”

“It's a pity you wouldn't be allowed to live your own life your own way,” he said. “I'll never understand all this kind of nonsense. Interference and all that.”

“That's one of the reasons why you haven't ever married, isn't it? Because it almost always means interference.”

“It does,” he agreed. “But all the interference in the world isn't going to stop me now. Darling, I've to leave you while I get this done. I won't be long. You'll come to me downstairs?”

“I'll come,” repeated Valentine.

She saw him dash into his room and out again with his handful of papers.

As he passed her, Lonergan, pausing for an instant, looked straight at her, unsmiling, and then he went on down the stairs.

Valentine, thinking of all that her lover's eyes had said to her and unaware of anything else, slowly drew the fringes of her Chinese silk shawl away from the banister rails.

On her way down she passed Venetia's closed door. There was a thin line of light beneath it.

The grandfather clock on the landing showed it to be a quarter to twelve.

But that isn't really very late, Valentine thought, although she felt as though many hours must have gone by since she had come upstairs with her sister-in-law

For how many years had she assumed that all evenings came to an end before midnight!

In the wider world, outside Coombe and houses like it — in the world to which Rory Lonergan belonged — no such routine existed.

His world would be less unfamiliar to her than hers to him. And not only would Rory find her tiny world
unfamiliar: Valentine knew that its conventions would always, to the artist and the Irishman, seem unendurable. He would never see in them anything worthy of respect or of toleration so far as his own conduct was concerned and he would never conform to standards that he saw as meaningless and unreal. What he had said of Primrose was equally true of himself: She'll accept anything provided it's a really true thing.

Rory wouldn't feel the pattern of life at Coombe to be a really true thing. He would, for all his intelligence and his insight and his sympathy, find himself for ever unable to view seriously the traditional and long-since out-moded forms of existence that to Valentine still seemed natural.

It's I who'll change, she thought. Not Rory.

She felt a swift lightening of her spirit within her and knew a long-forgotten sense of exhilaration.

She would be glad to change, to abandon at last the personality that marriage, and the years, and the children, had gradually manufactured for Valentine Arbell, for the protection of the true self of Valentine Levallois.

When Hughie Spurway, gulping and grimacing, had left the schoolroom and regained his own room the always-tenuous thread that bound him to sanity snapped temporarily.

He lost all control, throwing himself on the bed, gnashing his teeth and weeping, swearing and sobbing under his breath.

“She needn't have been like that—she
needn't
have
been,” he repeated over and over again, saying the words aloud.

Primrose had danced with Charles Sedgewick in the drawing-room until Jess had Clamoured for a change of partners and Sedgewick himself had said:

“Okay. Let's change over.”

Jess had giggled and said apologetically: “Of course, you're terrifically good, Charles, and I'm not. But I don't mind if you don't.”

They'd laughed about it.

Hughie wasn't as good a dancer as Charles Sedgewick either, and, unlike Jess, he did mind. He had been afraid lest Primrose should comment on his inadequacy.

But she had said nothing at all—only pressed herself against him as they moved and given herself up completely to his guidance. And a measure of self-confidence had come back to him on that account.

“Darling, this is marvellous for me,” he'd ventured to say.

Primrose had replied with her favourite monosyllable. “Why?”

“You know I'm crazy about you.”

Hughie had tried to make the words, in themselves so banal, sound casual.

“Idiotic.”

“Sweet, it isn't. I swear it's not. Oh, Primrose, can't things go back to what they used to be? We were so terribly happy a year ago.”

“Were we? I don't know what you were—you often looked to me pretty miserable—but I can assure you that I was bored stiff more than half the time.”

“For God's sake, don't take everything away from me. At least let me be able to remember that it
was
heaven once, even if it's been hell ever since.”

“Aren't you the complete neurotic hero of a pre-war novel! Going all tense and embittered and tragic.”

He'd tried to laugh, then, in the middle of the torture, thinking that perhaps if he followed her mood she might be placated and stop being cruel to him.

“It did sound a bit that way, I admit. But honestly, Primrose, I do simply adore you. There's no other woman in the world, and never has been.”

“Good reason why.”

He'd driven straight on, crashing through his own agonies of pain and humiliation.

“That's all over. You know as well as I do that there's nothing and no one in my life now except you. Why can't you be kind to me again?”

“Don't be such a fool, Hughie. Can't you see that when a thing's over, it's over?”

“Then don't you care for me at all any more?”

It was the question that had burned in his heart and on his lips for months past and that he had sworn to himself never to ask, lest he should have to hear the answer.

Even as he did ask it, Hughie had known an additional twist of self-contempt at his lack of resolution.

Failed—once more.

The punishment had come very swiftly and surely.

“I'm afraid I don't, Hughie. Since you ask me. Anyway, it wasn't ever very much of a thing. I'm not much of a one for what the poets call Lâhve—as I've always told you.”

“You've had lovers?”

“Naturally. But I've never pretended to them, or to myself or anybody, that there was going to be any question of fidelity. For God's sake, don't grip my arm like that. You're hurting like hell.”

“I'm frightfully sorry. I didn't mean to. Look, Primrose, I accept all that. I do know how you feel, about fidelity. I don't care. Will you marry me just the same?”