Late and Soon (34 page)

“Jess is the only responsibility that really counts. I could leave Coombe.”

She looked at him with the extreme gravity of a gentle and sensitive child, seeking a formula in which to express her goodwill.

“I'd thought—but I see that it isn't any use—that perhaps, if it was only ourselves—and Jess and Arlette sometimes—you'd live at Coombe, Rory. You wouldn't, would you?”

“Ah, how can I answer that? You break my heart—you're so gentle, so generous. But this place—it's the background of almost all your life—it holds all your memories. But what about mine? What about Rory Lonergan? If I lived here I'd be betraying myself, as a person. You don't understand” —he used the phrase that he had used before— “I'd continually need to get away from this way of living. It's all right for you and Coombe, I know, but it all means nothing, and less than nothing, to me. I couldn't stand these people. I'd miss
my own raffish friends—all the goings-on that I've taken for granted—getting drunk— I'd lose my own soul. Oh, God, I'll never be able to make you see what I mean.”

“I do see. You say that I don't understand, but I do.”

She pushed back the silvery wave of hair from her forehead, still looking at him earnestly.

“Val—I'm out of my mind, going on like this. Dear God, what will we do? I love you so, and we're not free—we're being forced apart like this—we can't even take time to make a decision as important as this one.”

Valentine drew his head to rest against her breast.

“Do you want not to marry me, Rory? For me to become your mistress?”

“Ah, no, not that, with you. I'd never want that.”

“I'm glad.”

Presently he said:

“Forgive me for what I've put you through, Val—you must forgive me. Sometimes I get these panics and I can't manage them. Laurence was the only person who could help me—she had great instinctive wisdom. But I hurt her many times, God forgive me, and now I've hurt you.”

“It's all right, Rory.”

“It is not,” he answered sadly.

“You told me once that everything had to be made clear between us. You said that our relationship was far too important for anything else to be possible. It was quite true. The things that you've said to-night had to be faced by us both, hadn't they?”

“They had, but not in the wild, crack-pot state I'm in now. It's been a shattering day, and finding that I couldn't get the child on the telephone to-night just about finished it. To-morrow I'll have sense, Val.”

He rose to his feet and looked down at her, appalled by the shadowed pallor of her face and the dark stains beneath her eyes.

“If we had time—if only we had time!” he repeated helplessly.

As though in ironic comment, the clock outside chimed the hour.

“I'll have to go. It'll be to-morrow when I get back.”

He took her in his arms and kissed the sorrowful line of her mouth.

“Will it be our wedding day, darling—darling?”

Valentine clung to him without speaking a word for a long moment.

Then she said:

“I don't know, Rory. I love you.”

“And I love you,” he echoed passionately.

She heard the heavy, inner doors swing open and come together again, and then a more distant vibration that was the front door shutting behind Lonergan.

Valentine lay back in her chair, motionless. She was too much tired to move.

The frustrations and disappointments of the day, the news that Lonergan was to be sent overseas and, above all, his exposition of such deeply-rooted complexities of mind and temperament—so deeply rooted that they could temporarily take possession of his judgment and impinge upon his love—had left her desolate and exhausted.

She felt herself to be at last defeated, wholly and finally, in the long, inner conflict between her own romantic spirit and the reality of human relations.

Valentine had no falsely cynical comments to make upon this sense of disillusionment.

She knew still that life might have been otherwise. But defeat was natural to her. She felt it to be inevitable and she had no impulse of blame either towards herself or Lonergan, nor even towards those who had interfered in their affairs.

It was nothing outside himself that had caused her lover to speak the words that kept on repeating themselves over and over again in her mind.

“I've seen something of your life … I've nothing, nothing in common with any of it. … And there's Arlette … she's used to an artist's life—the kind that Laurence and I led. …”

It came back to Laurence in the end, always. He had even said:

“I get these panics … Laurence was the only person who could help me. …”

His mad solicitude for Arlette, for whom he had had so little feeling throughout her childhood, was in reality an extension of his love for Arlette's mother.

Not seeking it, but unable to escape it, Valentine was obsessed by the remembrance of Lonergan's profound emotion when he had first told her about Laurence.

“Her forehead was lovely—I honestly can only think of one word that could ever describe the breadth and purity of it—and that's luminous. She had that quality, and it was all in that beautiful, wide brow.”

And he'd said:

“We were crazy about one another. I'd decided long ago I wasn't ever going to marry. But I had to ask Laurence to marry me.”

Laurence hadn't married him. She'd stood in the little
tonnelle
in the garden of the tall, pink house at Saumur, with the tears running down her face, and she'd offered to come and live with him in Paris.

“That was the thing about Laurence—she understood
and accepted things that were quite outside her own tradition.”

Lonergan's words, the deep, musical intonations that his voice had given to them, were as living to her as though she were listening as she had listened on the night of his arrival at Coombe. Indeed, they had returned to her many times since then, always with that strange, agonizing pang made of jealousy, and of a deliberate acceptance of the inalienable truth.

He and she had found one another too soon, and too late.

In the years between their two encounters lay their separate lives.

Lonergan had met Laurence. He had loved her as he had not loved before or since, any of the women who had roused his easy susceptibilities. There would always remain in him the profound desire to keep something of this one true and passionate union alive, in his preoccupation with Laurence's child.

Perhaps I could have borne that—I once thought that I could—Valentine told herself—but he won't share it with me. I can't make him feel that I accept it. He said: I'll never be able to make you see what I mean. … You don't understand. …

He'd said that more than once.

We ought to have spent our lives together, he and I, thought Valentine. I'd have been the person I was meant to be, then, and we should have felt safe with one another.

She heard a door slam and there was the indefinable sound that warned her of someone approaching.

Valentine put out her hand and turned off the light.

“Val, my dear! Where are you?”

It was Venetia Rockingham's voice.

Valentine made no movement and no reply, and she heard her sister-in-law, after pausing for a moment, go upstairs.

Next day Venetia would have left Coombe. Soon they would all have gone—the girls as well.

Valentine rose wearily. She had felt herself too tired to move, but the physical effort automatically became possible at the remembrance of Primrose and Jessica.

She would go upstairs and say good-night to Jess, even though she might not intrude upon her other and most-loved child.

When she came downstairs again, to extinguish the lights and make certain that the door was unbolted for Lonergan's return in the early morning, it was nearly midnight and Valentine was startled by the sound of the telephone bell.

There leapt instantly to her mind the wild hope that she might hear Rory Lonergan's voice, but it was a busy-sounding, impersonal tone that came through the receiver.

“I have a telegram for Colonel Lonergan. Will you take it?”

“I'll take it,” said Valentine.

She drew towards her the little pad that swung against the wall and balanced it against the bracket on which stood the telephone. Her cold fingers found the blunt, small pencil that lay there in readiness. Her mind automatically registered, as it had done for years, a protest against the inconvenience of all these arrangements.

“Handed in at Kilronan at twenty-five minutes past four.”

Valentine's pencil obediently wrote down: Kilronan 4.25. She waited while the male voice at the other end gave Lonergan's name and address.

The message followed:

“Please come or send for me flying quite possible want terribly to see you please telephone first I implore you come to Babette qui rit please.

“That's all. No signature. Shall I send a confirmation copy?”

“Yes, please.”

“What is the postal address?”

Valentine gave it, and hung up the receiver.

She stood in the cold, mechanically smoothing out the paper on which she had taken down Arlette's message.

Babette qui rit.

Rory hadn't told her about that pet-name, the familiar household joke that must have survived from Arlette's baby days.

Poor, touching, frantic child, making use of it now to strengthen her appeal.

Valentine had no idea whether or not it would be possible for Lonergan to get to Ireland and back within the forty-eight hours of his leave. She supposed that probably it would.

Or he could send for Arlette if there was the least chance that the battalion might not be sailing at once.

She returned to the hall, moving slowly and stiffly as if the intense cold that gripped her was slowly freezing her body into rigidity. Her thoughts worked, with careful impersonality, over the mechanics of the situation.

Lonergan had missed Arlette at the telephone but he said that he had telegraphed to her in the morning.

That message must have reached her quickly enough, or she couldn't have despatched her own telegram at twenty-five minutes past four.

Perhaps he hadn't told her what time he would ring up.

Perhaps the old aunt, whom it was so impossible to think of as Rory's sister, had decided that Arlette must attend the concert, and that another telephone call could be put through next day. But no—that wouldn't do. There'd have been a message left at Kilronan post-office in that case, surely.

Valentine decided that Lonergan, in his telegram, had
announced the fact of his embarkation leave and had said that he would telephone, without specifying the day or the hour. How, indeed, could he have been certain of the hour at all?

Her meaningless speculations and calculations brought Valentine into her own room, the full onslaught of the pain that awaited her still held at bay.

The clock on the landing struck five. Valentine had heard the chiming of all the hours since one o'clock.

As the last reverberation died away, another sound, remote and carefully controlled, reached her. It was that of the hall door being cautiously opened and shut again.

She knew that Lonergan had returned.

Lying open-eyed in the dark, her senses acutely sharpened, she seemed to herself able to follow all his movements accurately.

Now he had passed through the swing-doors and stopped in the hall. Conspicuous on a table at the foot of the stairs lay her transcription of Arlette's telegram, where she had placed it, clearing everything off the little table so that he could not miss it.

He was reading it now.

There was no further sound.

She lay, expecting to hear him go down the hall again, to where the telephone was. But no movement of any kind reached her.

Valentine remained tense and motionless for what appeared to her a long while.

Presently she glanced at the illuminated face of the travelling clock, old and shabby and reliable—one of her wedding presents, she remembered—that stood in its faded blue-and-gilt folding frame next to her bedside.

Twenty minutes had gone by since she had heard the clock strike, and Rory Lonergan letting himself in at the door. The stillness was absolute.

At last it was broken.

She heard Lonergan's step on the stairs.

He was walking slowly and with care, as though anxious to make no noise.

At the door of his room he did not stop, nor did the faint, familiar click of the turning handle reach her. He was going straight on, past his own room, to the end of the schoolroom passage where the short flight of stairs led to the top storey.

Valentine waited, sad and bewildered, but she heard nothing more.

No explanation occurred to her. She was too weary to search for one, and presently she fell asleep.

Madeleine's knock at the door woke her.

Madeleine put down the small tea-tray by the bed and drew back the curtains. It was not quite dark, a chill dawn was breaking and a pearly grey light filtered into the room.

Valentine shivered and lay still.

Madeleine came and stood beside the bed.

“Madame,” she said softly, “the world is all white. It has been snowing.”

Old associations rushed into Valentine's mind instantly. Her own astonished pleasure, in childhood, at the still purity of the English countryside under snow … the excited delight of Primrose as a little girl building a snowman on the lawn with Humphrey … the branches of the trees in the orchard sending up an occasional light flurry of white from snow-laden branches. All came and went in a flash and then she was fully awakened, caught into the realities of the present.

“Is it half-past seven?” she asked doubtfully.

There was a strange stillness over everything, as though Coombe had not yet emerged from the enveloping quiet of the night.