Lover's Leap (5 page)

She was excited, enthralled: her eyes shone. Never had I seen her so beautiful,.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘Yes'; feeling that all she said of the rainbow was true, for me, of her. But when would the miracle happen? How long should I have to wait?

The rain slackened, stopped; but the sky remained clouded as if threatening more. We ate our lunch in the quarry and before we had finished the rain began again. Soon after three o'clock it had driven us down to the shelter of the plain, and running and walking we reached Barrowhurst, the rain streaming from our waterproofs into our shoes, and took refuge in the inn.

They lit a fire for us in the parlour and brought us tea. The run in the rain had amused and stimulated Rose and she began to chatter about her childhood. The inn reminded her of a north-country inn, near the Cheviots, at which she used to stay as a child with her parents and small brother, and she recalled a day when they had climbed a great bare hill, taking lunch with them.

‘I must have been about ten then,' she said, ‘and my brother seven; and after lunch he and I wandered away from our parents. My father shouted after me, telling me not to go out of sight, but I pretended not to hear him. My idea was to walk right round the hill, and I told
jimmy that we were going round the world like Captain Cook. I knew that if we went on walking we were bound to get back to where we had started from. We walked and walked and a very long time seemed to pass and everything looked stranger and stranger. Jimmy was frightened and began to cry; and I believe I was really frightened too, though I don't remember feeling frightened. But though I insisted that everything was all right, I do remember feeling that we ought to hurry, and as Jimmy went slower and slower and said he was tired I took his hand and pulled him along. At last we heard shouts and my father came running towards us. He was very breathless and very angry. He had been hunting for us for three quarters of an hour, he said, and it was lucky for us that he had found us. I told him that we weren't lost, that I knew perfectly well where we were. I remember asserting this several times very positively and I was angry when he wouldn't believe me. But as a matter of fact I believe now that this was all bluff and that I had known for some time we were lost and had been thoroughly frightened. But the truth was, I wasn't going to admit it. I was annoyed with my father: I had two grievances, first that he had laid down the law in the tiresome way that grownups had and forbidden us to go out of sight, and then that he had been so insufferably justified by events. So I simply refused to admit, even to myself, that he
was
justified. And I was so determined to think that we had not been lost that in the end I succeeded, and even now I have only a very faint and doubtful recollection of having realized that things had gone wrong.' She laughed. ‘Do you think,' she said, ‘that all children are such appalling little liars?'

I said I believed that almost everyone remembered things as he wished them to have been, rather than as they had actually been.

‘Yes,' she said, ‘by degrees, perhaps, by a slow, almost
unconscious process of self-deception, but not so suddenly or so deliberately as I did.'

‘No,' I said, ‘you made rather a smarter job of it than most of us. However, you've confessed now.'

‘Yes, I've confessed; but the dreadful thing is that I'm not sure whether what I've confessed is the truth or not.'

She looked at me with delightfully comic dismay.

I shook my head, ‘It's a terrible mess, I'm afraid. What emerges, of course, is that you're extremely independent. Independence at all costs.'

‘I wonder,' she said. ‘I wonder if I am.'

I thought of the newspaper, the book, the knitting she had brought as a protection against me, but I said nothing. Instead I asked her more about her visits to the north, for these tales of her childhood, received from her own lips, enchanted me, and that she should be so willing to tell them to me seemed to be a mark of friendly confidence.

We talked till it was time to go to the station, and that was almost the end of our talking, for as soon as we were in the train she got out her book and did not stop reading, though I tried when we were nearing London to start a conversation, until we arrived at Victoria. My happiness withered as we entered the station, for now I no longer had her securely alone. Once more London roared round us and in a moment I would resign her to Jennifer, her home, her friends, all the barriers that stood between her and me. And in a moment she was gone; coldly and abruptly, it seemed, we had separated and I was alone, disenchanted, face to face with myself.

Later the same day. Why could I not have been content with such a day? Why, when I was returning home after an early dinner, should I have felt that craving for one more glimpse of her which urged me to walk three times past her flat, staring at the long windows on the first floor in the hope of seeing her or her shadow? It
was, one would have thought, extremely unlikely that I should see anything; but Fate punishes those who ask too much, and so, as I passed her flat for the third time, the front door opened and two women in evening dress, one of them Rose, came out followed by a young man in an opera hat. The young man hailed a passing cab, the three got into it and drove away, and I was left to realize how small a corner I occupied in her life.

Yet what cause have I to be wounded, what right to feel that by telling me nothing of this engagement Rose was deliberately hiding it from me? None. But I do.

A month later. There has been another long interval since I opened this diary, an interval uneventful in its happiness. We have met several times, and twice after dining with the Ethertons we have walked home together. It seems that nowadays I have recourse to the diary only when something goes wrong, and something has gone wrong to-day. Rose and I were to meet at three o'clock this afternoon at the Leicester Gallery to see the Gauguin show; but she did not come, and I hung about in a state of horribly increasing anxiety for over an hour. I know that in all that concerns her I am utterly unreasonable: my craving to be as important to her as she is to me makes me think and act as if I were really so. That is why I assumed that only something very serious could have prevented her meeting me. I deceive myself as successfully as she deceived herself when in her childhood she and her brother were lost on the hill. And so I hung about the gallery, now staring stupidly at the pictures, now tormenting myself with images of disaster.

Some time after four o'clock someone touched my elbow and I turned with a start of incredulous relief. But it was not Rose: it was old Etherton.

‘Do I disturb a worshipper?' he asked.

‘An admirer,' I replied: ‘an admirer with reservations.'

‘Then come along to the club and have some tea.'

‘I can't,' I said; ‘I'm. meeting a friend here.'

He took my arm and led me in front of the picture of Jacob wrestling with the angel. ‘Philip,' he said, ‘you'd never do for a business man. Your face is an open book. Shall I tell you what I read there? I read that you're waiting for Rose Bentley, your colour betrayed that; and that you've been waiting for a very long time, that is betrayed by your expression. How long have you been waiting?'

For a moment I was annoyed by his inquisitiveness, but his friendly smile disarmed me and I told him: ‘An hour.'

‘Then take my advice, my dear boy, and don't wait any longer. If she comes, which seems unlikely, she'll despise you for your want of independence.'

At Etherton's words Rose's story of her childish adventure on the hill instantly flashed into my mind, and in the light of it his remark was startlingly illuminating. Its aptness made me angry and I replied: ‘But I'm not independent.'

‘The more's the pity,' he said. ‘Well, at least you owe it to yourself to pretend to be.'

‘Pretend?' I said. ‘Why should I pretend? Is there any harm in being honest and natural?'

‘None at all,' he said, ‘if you hadn't from the beginning chosen the other course. Haven't you disguised your feelings from the outset, haven't you been scheming and pretending and suppressing all this time? Your only hope, since you started in as a diplomat, is to be a first-rate diplomat, not a bad one. Come along quickly, for fear she arrives and finds you here.'

I knew in my heart of hearts that he was right, but I couldn't go, couldn't run the risk of missing her if she came.

‘No,' I said feebly, ‘I must wait just a little longer.'

He shook his head. ‘I don't like it,' he said half humorously
, half seriously; ‘I don't like it at all.' He made a sign of farewell and left me. Then he returned. ‘I forgot,' he said; ‘you're both dining with us this evening, aren't you?'

I nodded. After waiting another twenty minutes I too left the gallery.

Yes, Etherton is right about my diplomacy. As soon as I got into the street I found myself practising it. For weeks I have been diplomatic in the matter of the telephone, repressing my impulses to ring her up at odd moments and on slight pretexts, and now I repressed my impulse to ring her up and ask what had happened. But what if she were not at the Ethertons' to-night? I should never be able to sit there the whole evening in ignorance of what had happened to her. Perhaps, if I spoke to old Etherton about it, he would take pity on me and ring up her flat.

But when I arrived at the Ethertons', Rose was there already. She was talking to a man and woman, people of about her own age, whom I did not know, and for some time she did not notice me. At last, turning and catching sight of me, she came towards me.

‘Do forgive me for leaving you in the lurch this afternoon,' she said. ‘Two old friends whom I hadn't seen for nearly a year turned up unexpectedly just as I was starting and I couldn't very well leave them on the doorstep. I felt sure you wouldn't mind.'

I assured her that she had been right, but I knew, from the sudden quenching of her smile, that my face belied my words. I hoped she would stay and talk to me, but she was anxious to introduce me to my supplanters.

‘They're the couple I was talking to just now,' she said; ‘I'm sure you'll like them. Edith Bryan and I were at school together and he, her brother, is a geologist. They've just come back from Peru'; and with that she led me off to be introduced.

They are really, I'm sure, quite nice people, but I hated them both at once and suspected him of being in love with Rose. Worse, I half believe Rose is in love with him. He took her in to dinner and it seemed as if she was talking to one or other of them the whole evening.

And worse, far worse, was to come. My last shred of comfort was denied me; for when the Bryans were making their adieus Rose came over to me and told me that they were driving her home. ‘They want to see Jennifer whom they missed this afternoon.'

There was the same innocent confidence in her eyes as when she had apologised for her defection this afternoon. Evidently she dealt me these blows without the least idea of their effect on me. If the position had been reversed, if it had been I who was excusing myself, she would, I'm sure, have accepted my desertion with perfect good humour. Ah, but wouldn't that have been merely because it meant so little to her? But this time I did my best to hide my mortification, for fear I should again see that sudden quenching of her smile and feel that I had pained her.

Old Etherton is right. This policy of suppression and pretence and self-abasement is the worst I could have chosen. It would have been better, I'm sure now, if at our very first meeting I had blurted out my true feelings, tipped the whole cartload of ecstasy at her feet. She would have been astounded, embarrassed no doubt, but there's no one, surely, who can help being pleased by adoration. It could hardly have failed to rouse her interest and sympathy, to make me, at least, a person who merited special treatment and special concessions. And doesn't love call forth love? But, as it is, I don't offer her love, I disguise it, and so I seem to ask nothing of her. It may be that she looks on me as no more than a friend merely because I seem to her to be, and to wish to be, no more. Certainly we have come to a standstill, drifted
into a gently swirling backwater from which we shall never emerge unless I rouse myself and thrust us out into the main current. What a fool I am. I behave to Rose more like a woman, more like an early Victorian virgin, than a man. I still sit secretly eating my heart out and waiting for her to fall in love with me. What the devil is it that's wrong with me? Is it cowardice, is it laziness, or is it some deeply rooted diffidence which I shall never fathom and never eradicate? If that is so, I am powerless and may as well submit; for surely there is nothing to be gained by fighting against one's nature. Can a man change himself, his character and temperament, by taking thought? I suppose many people, at one time or another of their lives, have longed to do so, just as I now dream of throwing off this old careful, tentative, secretive self that hampers and disgusts me at every turn, and putting on a forthright, impulsive, garrulous, assertive self that would execute my desires. Can I not, by sheer self-compulsion, by taking myself as it were by the scruff of the neck, by doggedly disregarding all sense of shame, all fear of ridicule, express my feelings without restraint and immodestly demand what I desire?

Two days later. Rose rang me up this morning to ask me to take her to the picture show she missed two days ago. After we had seen it I brought her back to tea here. While we sat at tea I said to her:

‘You told me, that day we sheltered in the inn at Barrowhurst, how monstrously you lied to your father when you were lost on the hill.'

She laughed. ‘But at least,' she said, ‘I confessed in the end. I confessed to you.'

‘Yes, Rose, you confessed. And now I'm going to confess to you. I'm going to confess that ever since we first met at the Ethertons' I've been lying to you. I've been pretending I'm not in love with you.'