Sunflower (30 page)

It was a pity that the footman should have come back to announce lunch just at that moment; and that Francis Pitt should have started up so violently at his entrance, and burst into nervous laughter, and moved away from her. It looked as if they had been kissing or doing something silly, and she could see from the footman’s face, from an infinitesimal thickening of those coarse lips, from a shifting of his eye under the drooped lids, that that was exactly what he thought. She couldn’t but admit that this was Francis Pitt’s fault. He hadn’t been thinking of touching her when the door was opened, he’d been feeling far too upset about whatever it was that her words suggested to him, and he wouldn’t have anyway, since she was with Essington; but his mind had had some comic postcard stuff about kissing in it, and that had showed. If one stayed ever so quiet in a scene where one ought to be listening intently, but instead got thinking of whether Essington would still be cross when one went home, they felt it out in front at once. It occurred to her, and the suspicion strengthened as she crossed the hall and felt him snort with a silent chuckle and brush against her as they got into the dark part outside the dining-room, that quite possibly he might be cheap and common when he made love. She had always known that he was not a gentleman as Essington was, that he had not been so nicely brought up. It did not matter at most times because he was nice inside and never had anything to express but kindliness and protectiveness and strength; but she could imagine that when he was feeling jolly and wanted to have a good time with somebody he liked he might get vulgar and enjoy meaningless noises and scufflings like those she used to hear when she was little and there were family festivities and cousins went to help each other wash up in the scullery. Even then she had not liked such things, they seemed an injury to beauty like footmarks on a sheet of snow; and in the life she had lived since they would have been counted as certain evils had they ever been thought of, for they were akin to bad acting and would have been more disgusting than any sin to Essington, who so greatly hated all sounds and movements that were not fine-pointed with purpose. She knew that in this matter she and Essington and her world were right, and that Francis Pitt was wrong. But if it were the way that Francis Pitt felt, then she would put up with it. Again she had that feeling of being a great draught-horse that could drag any load.

As they entered the dining-room the footman, plainly embarrassed by having to ask a question he ought to have asked in the other room, said, ‘You’ll not be waiting for Mr Harrop, then, sir?’

There was a third place laid at the table. Sunflower and Francis Pitt both stared at the diagram of knives and forks on the white cloth in silence. Francis Pitt pulled himself together. ‘No, no. Mr Harrop’s not lunching with us! I never meant him to! Take those things away!’

It was all right. He had wanted to be alone with her.

But she did hate that footman. He made such a clatter taking away the silver, and looked so rudely at Francis Pitt while he did it, as if he wanted to answer back. But it was lovely when he had left the room. She had been thinking of something disagreeable just before he came in, but now she could not have imagined what it could have been, although she was so shaken by the beating of her heart that she felt dizzy. Life suddenly seemed to have changed its gear and to have become calmer than she had ever known it. The heavy curtains were looped back from the window and she could look straight up into a dark blue sky, which because it was crossed by bright white clouds like galleons in full sail seemed not like a dome of warm summer air but like an inverted salt and invigorating sea. The spinach and eggs she was eating, and the iced lemonade she was drinking, had a clean taste, and the flowers in the room were all of cottage garden kinds, with dark sprigs of sweet-smelling herbs among them. And Francis Pitt did not look silly any more, but sat at the head of his table as one would like to see a man sit at the head of one’s table, dignified and leisurely and sensible. There was not a thing she would have wished different.

‘Well,’ he asked after a while, ‘how’s the play going?’

Absurdly she found that she was shy. Her voice came in the funniest little husky growl. ‘All right.’

A minute later he tried again.

‘Has the man who’s been rehearsing Cosmo Davis’s part played it yet?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he give a good show?’

‘Mm. Rather.’

It was dreadful. She must sound quite rude. She wanted to cry.

He ate a few more mouthfuls, set down his fork, put his elbows on the table, and cupped his face in his hands. Looking into her eyes, he said deliberately, ‘Dear Sunflower, who hasn’t a word to say for herself for ever so long after she comes into a room. Just sits mum. But who all the time is the best company in the world.’

She set down her fork too. He continued to sit quite still and look at her. She could feel that the intimacy of his words and their undisguised affection were as much of a delight to him as they were to her, as much of an indulgence after long famine. Her hands fluttered up to cover her mouth. Through her laced fingers she smiled at him plaintively, begging for mercy. He must not make her too happy.

He went on, ‘Do you know that, Sunflower? There isn’t a soup ever made that has heard a single word from your lips. It all goes down to its grave behind the waistcoat buttons without ever getting a whisper of that lovely voice of yours. There isn’t a fish that ever heard it either. The roast beef or chicken may get a little bit of it. May get a “Mm” or the beginning of a sentence that gets chopped in two on a pink lower lip by two remarkably handsome white teeth. But nothing but the ice-pudding has any real luck. I could sing when I see that stuff coming in, though I haven’t touched it for years. I say to myself, “Now we’ll hear what Sunflower has to say”. And then she does let us know what sort of pretty things she’s been thinking and feeling about this old world of ours, and it makes us all very happy. And that’s how it goes every time.’

She smiled and moved her lips, but no sound would come.

‘Tell me, Sunflower, why are you so shy with us? Are you bored with us?’

‘Oh, no. Oh, no,’ she murmured.

‘Are you sure? Are you quite sure that you don’t find the talk tedious between us old men who care for dry things like politics? Are we asking too much of a kindness when we ask you to come here?’

‘Oh, no!’ she cried, finding her voice, ‘I’d rather be here than anywhere else in the whole world. I don’t know what I’d do if you stopped asking me!’

He blinked. She saw that he was enormously pleased; but he continued to speak very gravely. ‘I am glad of that. I am very glad of that. Sometimes I’ve been worried by your silence. But I suppose it only means that you and I, Sunflower, are the kind of friends who do not have to talk to be of use to each other.’

He took up his fork and went on with his eggs. She could not. She did not seem to want any food. To make things quite clear between them, so that he should never be troubled again by any suspicion that she did not like being with him, she explained timidly, ‘Really, I don’t talk because I haven’t anything to say.’

‘Nonsense. You have a great deal to say.’

‘Really I haven’t. I’m ever so stupid.’

‘You are not.’

‘Yes, I am. You don’t know how stupid I am. A head like a sieve. I can’t remember a thing.’

‘Yes, you can. You remember your parts. And you remember them well. That’s a very long part you’re playing now. And never once in all the times I’ve seen you in it have I heard the prompter helping you.’

‘What? What? Have you seen it more than once?’

He was embarrassed. ‘Yes … two or three times …’

To shield his embarrassment and her glowing pleasure she stumbled on quickly, ‘That’s different. I can’t remember other things. History. Dates. I don’t know when kings were. I tell you I’m stupid.’

‘I tell you you are not. You show intelligence in lots of ways. You run your house well. You are shrewd about practical things. You never spent foolishly in your life. You have good taste in art. You notice fine points about people. You are not a stupid woman.’

Perturbed, because this was such a reversal of what she had heard from Essington, she murmured, ‘But I am stupid, really I am …’

‘I tell you you are not. If you have not mastered the world of intellectual things that Essington and I live in it is because you haven’t taken the trouble. You are reserving your energies for something else. That is how you always strike me. As being full of strength you will not spend on anything that you are doing now, because you are saving it for other things.’

She looked at him with interest. She had felt that about herself quite often. Sometimes her body tingled from head to foot with undischarged force. Then she would want to get up and run round and round the room, and at the same time would want to go and lie down on her bed and cry and cry because there must be some more sensible thing to do when one was like that but she did not know what it was.

‘What are you saving your strength for, Sunflower?’

She stared at him with knitted brow.

‘For your acting?’

The idea made her laugh. ‘No.’

‘Well, what do you really want to do?’

When he put it that way she understood the whole thing. She gazed down at her plate and pouted her lips, trying to look as if she did not understand it.

‘Supposing you could change your whole life and spend the rest of it doing what you like, what would you choose to do?’

It was awful. He was keeping his eyes on her so insistently. Surely he ought to have sense enough to know what almost every woman really wanted to do. A blush was pouring over her face, her neck, her breasts; and the blood seemed to be dragging a harrow of pleasure through her flesh, so that tears of delight and agony stood in her eyes. It was awful. There was nothing more unthinkable than that one should tell a man that one wanted to have babies unless one was going to have his babies and it was almost all fixed up. And she was with Essington, she was with Essington. Yet she felt as if, were he to go on any longer, she would cry it aloud in simple words that they would never either of them be able to forget. Her gaze shifted from her plate across the table, seeking for something to talk about, to break the domination of his easy, innocent inquisitiveness. She remembered the place that had been laid just opposite her, and muttered, ‘What was it about Mr Harrop that made you so angry?’

There was a silence. She heard his heel come down smartly on the electric floor bell. ‘He has made a fool of himself. Ruined his career at the beginning.’

She knew from his gruffness that he did not like the subject but she could think of nothing else to keep him from the other. ‘How?’

‘He’s got himself engaged.’

‘Who to?’

‘A girl who works along with him in my office.’

‘A typist?’ The footman was back in the room. She had to keep this talk going. It would be too awful if Francis Pitt started off again in front of him.

‘No. Higher than that. She’s an American girl who handles a good part of my American business.’

‘Oh, not that Miss Wycherley whom I met here one day?’

‘Yes. Miss Greta Wycherley.’ He said the name ironically as if it were a romantic statement of an ugly fact.

‘But I thought you liked her! I thought you said she was clever! And she’s ever so pretty.’

‘She’s all that.’ He spoke sharply and indicated with a nod at the footman that he would give her an explanation when they were alone once more.

‘She’s quite lovely,’ said Sunflower lamely.

‘Quite lovely,’ agreed Francis Pitt, with nearly a snarl. He sat back in his chair, suddenly looking grey and tired. He nodded his head silently and impressively, with the movements of an old man, as if he were repeating to himself some judgment he had recently delivered which had been so closely based on Biblical morality that it had made him feel like a patriarch. It occurred to her that perhaps underneath everything he had old-fashioned ideas. It might be that Miss Wycherley had been silly when she was young, that she’d made a mistake as people do before they know; and that Francis Pitt thought that men oughtn’t to marry a woman who had been with anybody else. Men were so queer, you could not tell in what direction they would fail you next. She must find out about that at once …

As soon as the footman had given them the cold chicken and salad and gone out she began timidly and obstinately, ‘This Miss Wycherley—’

He shot out a forefinger towards her wrist. ‘I’ve never seen you wear that before in the daytime.’

‘What?’

‘That bracelet.’

‘Oh … I put it on because I wasn’t sure that I’d go home before the theatre.’ She had prayed that he would ask her to tea as he sometimes did. In a panic lest he should guess she had prayed for that she added, ‘I’ve got some things to do.’ Oh, now he probably wouldn’t ask her, since she had expressly said she had other things to do. Life was so difficult.

‘It’s a gorgeous thing. One of the finest I’ve ever seen. You used not to wear it when you first came here.’

‘I didn’t have it then. Essington hadn’t given it to me.’

‘When did he give it to you?’

‘Just a week or two ago.’

He was so long in speaking that she thought he had tired of the subject, and was going to try and turn him back to Miss Wycherley, when he said genially, ‘Well, you’re an exceptionally happy couple, you and Essington, Sunflower. I don’t know many women who get presents like that after ten years.’

‘I know. I was ever so pleased. It’s the first thing of the sort he’s ever given me.’

‘What do you mean? The first bracelet?’

‘No, the first jewellery. He hasn’t seemed to care for jewellery.’

‘Then what has he given you?’

She tried to remember. ‘There was a Spanish shawl, about three years ago.’

He held out his hand for the bracelet. She made haste not to keep him waiting.

‘This is a very magnificent thing, Sunflower.’

‘I know it is. It must have cost quite a lot of money.’ She spoke with a puzzled air.