Sunflower (32 page)

She gazed at him anxiously and exclaimed, ‘What do you eat them for then?’

He shook his great head and said mournfully, ‘I am past caring for what the doctor says.’ He had helped himself and the footman turned aside, thinking he had taken enough; but Pitt called him back. ‘Here, I haven’t finished. I want more than that.’

It was really an enormous helping. She couldn’t eat her own though it was really lovely. She was all upset and said, ‘No, thank you,’ to the cream, though of course she hadn’t meant to. The minute the footman went out she put down her spoon and pressed him, ‘Did the doctor really say it was dangerous to eat these kind of things?’

‘Mm.’ He nodded and filled his mouth with raspberries.

‘Did he say it was actually dangerous?’

‘Mm. My God, these are good. These are very good.’

‘Then you mustn’t eat them. I suppose he’s afraid of the seeds irritating the—you mustn’t eat them.’

‘Mm.’

‘You mustn’t. You mustn’t. Oh, I don’t know how you can be so silly!’ She jumped up from her seat and ran round to him, and tried to make him put down the spoon he was raising to his mouth. He shouted with laughter, crammed it into his mouth and kept it there, looking up at her impudently. ‘Oh, you’re silly, just silly!’ she exclaimed indignantly. He took the spoon out of his mouth, and made faces at her and lowered it to fill it again. She moved her hands down to grip his wrists, but the sight of the thick hair curling from under his cuff, rather redder than the hair on his head, made her feel shy, so that she spread out her fingers for a minute stiffly and then drew them back and instead shook his coat-sleeve. That was, of course, not much good and when he put down his spoon it was only because he had laughed so much that he had spilt some raspberry juice on his dinner-mat and he was as tidy as a cat. He fell right back in his chair, puffing and choking, and she stood over him, crying, ‘Oh, you are silly to do what the doctor said you didn’t ought! Weren’t you ever taught—’ Suddenly, as if a match had been struck in her brain, she was alight with real anger at his folly, at his recklessness, at his lack of care in tending the pearl that was himself. She put her hands on his shoulders and shook, and shook, and shook him.

‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ He gasped through his laughter, in time to her shaking. ‘If you let me go—I’ll tell you—what it was the doctor said.’

She bent over him in fierce and tender concern.

‘He said … well, he said …’

‘Go on! Go on!’

‘Oh, Sunflower, Sunflower …’

She slapped him on the hand, quite hard, trying to hurt him.

He was giggling so much that he had to force it out. ‘He said that if I ate sweet things—I would get fat—and God knows it’s my beauty that got me where I am.’

‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘Oh! You are awful! Oh, indeed you are! Making fun of me!’ And she slapped him again, harder still, and then as he went on laughing she had to laugh too. Well, she oughtn’t to mind if he had teased her, he was so pleased with his little joke, and surely he wouldn’t dare to make such a donkey of himself in front of anybody he didn’t like and trust quite a lot. Dutifully she stood over him, laughing and looking down on him to see when she might safely stop. He had pushed his chair back and was sprawling in a beam of sunlight that lay without mercy on his ugliness, over which his own merriment was travelling like the distorting pencil of a caricaturist. She marvelled once again at the wrongness of every bit of him: at the glazed, earth-coloured skin, stretched so tightly over the queer broad forehead which, because of something bulging in the contours that made one think of bad engineering, one suspected of being no thicker than an eggshell; at his straggling hair; at the sly setting of his eyes and his great pale and shapeless lips; at his nose, which might have been pinched in wet clay by a savage; at his head which was so badly set on his neck, at his neck which was so badly set on his shoulders that round the collar he had the look of a badly packed parcel. She had never seen him look more hideous, more unborn. Yet she had never known him to give out so powerfully his peculiar emanation of warmth and impish sweetness. Suddenly and keenly she wanted him to be immediately her lover. For the first time she knew desire not as a golden cloud but as a darting line of light. But of course it could not happen, not anyhow, since she was with Essington. Looking down on him hungrily she perceived that he had slipped one of his arms up behind him and was resting his head on the crook of his elbow, gorging himself in the comfort of this moment, lying in it as if it were his mother’s lap. Without any doubt he was happy to be with her. She flung back her head and laughed, not as she had been laughing, to oblige him. This laughter shook out of her without the knowledge of her will, like a pulse made audible. It seemed to rise up into the room, to stand upright in the air above her like the climbing song of a lark. He became silent, his face was soft with pleasure as if he were a little drunk, his eyes watched a bumble-bee that was swinging slowly in the scent above the flowers on the table. Jealously she wondered, ‘Why does he watch that bumble-bee? Ah, I see! He likes the slow sound of its drumming, he would like life to move at that pace while he is with me.’ She felt cruel and triumphant like an angler that drags a great silver fish out of the water, pulls a scarlet hook out of its beating gills, and throws it down to flap and wriggle on the wet boards of the boat, caught, caught. His eyes were nearly closed, but his fingers were twitching. He lifted his hand a little way in the air, clenched it, and dropped it back on his knee. From his tight, tortured smile she knew that he had resolved to deny some longing that still was making him see pictures behind his drooped lids, and she was certain that for a minute he had had the intention of gripping her by the wrists and swinging her down to him so that he could kiss her lips. If he had done so she would have cried out with terror, if he did so now she would have to cry out, for it would be like letting him drive a spear into her body. But the thing in her that was implacable towards Francis Pitt was implacable towards her also. It held her there, though she put one hand behind her so that he should not touch it, though with the other she covered her mouth.

But a shadow of annoyance passed over his face. He turned sharply and looked over his shoulder at the door as if he had heard something. ‘Frederick,’ he said.

She went back to her place. They sat and waited. She felt giddy, as if she had had a glass of champagne.

‘H’m, I must have been mistaken,’ he said at last, in a queer, dispirited voice. ‘But God damn it, he will be coming back in a minute. There’s cheese, Sunflower, and there’s fruit.’

‘Goodness gracious, I don’t want any.’

‘No, Sunflower, of course we don’t want any. But because we have risen in the world, you and I, we have to sit here while a damned fool brings us fruit and cheese we can’t eat, and takes an hour to do it too.’ He spoke with a real, a despairing petulance.

‘Well, we don’t have to. After all, we’re just as good as the servants, really.’

He broke into a sudden, an inordinately violent yell of laughter. ‘Sunflower! Sunflower! You darling! Who says out loud what the rest of us timorously think! Oh, Sunflower! Sunflower! That’s what I’ve been saying to myself in the dead of night with my bedroom door locked, and here you say it out in the open!’

‘Well,’ she said, her giddiness making her feel restless, ‘I don’t care how funny you think me, there isn’t any reason why we shouldn’t go out into the garden.’

‘My God, I’m on. Down with the cheese and the fruit. Down with Frederick.’ He jumped up, swung her out of her chair, and went arm-in-arm with her to the door. He was her jolly brother now, her schoolboy comrade. She liked it, of course, in a sort of a way.

For fear of Frederick they hurried through the hall, lifting their fingers to their lips, peering over their shoulders, making comic grimaces to each other. Her giddiness made her stop and pout into his face, ‘I hate this house.’ To which he guffawed, ‘What a woman! What a woman!’ But it was a horrid house. She didn’t care if she had said it. The front door was a square of radiance in the darkness of the hall, which seemed like its adhesion to a grim philosophy, that dared to be so thick and umber because it knew that the time would come when that square would not show its contradictory brightness, when the outdoor world would come over to its way of thinking. He ought not to live here. He must move. A house in town. If he had to have one that was queer, there were those big ones by the river, in Chelsea. A house right out in the country. Some healthy place …

He ran down the steps, whistling, and waited for her. They strolled beside each other for a minute or two, silent, embarrassed. She had lost her tipsy feeling in the fresh air, he had lost his schoolboy spirits. There was no mood between them. Except the perpetual ache of her passion for him she felt nothing. It was like one of those nightmares in which one finds oneself on the stage before a huge audience and with no part, with no play, with only this vast and terrible obligation to entertain. He said as pompously as he might have said it to any stranger, ‘Come and look at my flowers.’ They turned aside from the drive and walked along the grass terrace outside the library windows, looking down on the preposterous scene, on the flower-beds that tossed like moored boats on a choppy sea over the broken levels of the old garden, on the flowers that grew so thickly in the beds, in the borders, on the ruined walls, that one thought of the glass shelves under the counter in an artificial flower department. He clicked his tongue and grunted good-humouredly, ‘Funny place, funny place,’ as if he were tolerating some other man’s folly in living there. ‘Let me give you one of my roses, let me give you one of my roses …’ Standing beside him while he got it for her she shivered. Now she knew that everything they said about the way he had made his money was true. He did not pick the rose, his paw-hands stole it from the tree. He was a thief. Well, that was nothing, nothing. She lifted her head and frowned into the sun, then dropped her face to the rose.

He lumbered on clumsily among his rose-trees, with his queer look of being a lion walking on his hind legs, growling a tune to himself with incredible tunelessness. He broke off to say, ‘I am happy, I am very happy today, Sunflower,’ and went back to his humming; and broke off again because from behind the trees that masked the turn of the drive there came the hoot of an automobile. The sound seemed to cut at his balance for he put out his short arms in front of him, just as a rearing lion would try to steady itself; and he swore violently. ‘Oh, God damn … Oh, God damn …’ She was reminded of the rage that had convulsed him when she first arrived. ‘This is that fool Cornelliss.’

‘Oh, bother him!’ she exclaimed. ‘It just would be Cornelliss.’

He turned on her sharply. ‘Don’t you like Cornelliss?’

‘Of course not. He’s a silly old thing, always standing about as if he were saying, “Well, at any rate, I’m not one to intrude”, and then somehow intruding without saying a thing more than anyone could talking nineteen to the dozen.’

He seemed pleased. ‘Poor Cornelliss. He has tried so hard to make you like him. Do you really not like him?’

‘No, I think he’s an awful old bore.’

His eyes were glinting. ‘Shall I hide you from him then? Come on, I’ll hide you.’ His hand closed round her wrist, he hurried her round the corner of the house. They both laughed gleefully, they were conspirators together as they had been when they ran away from Frederick. ‘In here, in here …’ As he held the French window open for her he shot a furtive, grinning look at her, as if there were an amusing and rather improper implication in what they were doing and he wondered if she perceived it. She found herself in a very small room that she had never been in before with hardly anything in it but bookshelves and a desk stacked with papers and two big armchairs. It was evidently what Essington would not have let her call Francis Pitt’s ‘den’. He pushed forward a chair for her and went out of the door, but put his head back to give her a last look. ‘Well, make yourself comfortable till I come back,’ he whispered, with that ingenuously knowing grin. He had that air of naively enjoying a situation that looked improper though it was not because that was as near impropriety as his innocence ever reached, which he had worn that night in her dressing-room. ‘I am in an actress’s dressing-room’, he had boasted to himself then. ‘I am hiding this very beautiful woman because someone is coming and they will think we are lovers’, he was boasting to himself now; and he was enjoying himself because he had never hidden a beautiful woman because someone was coming and they were lovers. She had altered her reading of what he was thinking in her dressing-room because it had occurred to her that he must often have visited Dolores Methuen and the Nelly sisters at the theatre. But this time she knew she was reading his thoughts right. She reminded herself, ‘Juliet Lynn, Mrs Lovatt, Veronica Fawcett’, but it meant nothing that she could believe. She was sure of his innocence. If he were spending his glee on a reality he could not have so much left over for an appearance.

He whispered, ‘Well, goodbye, till I’ve slaughtered Cornelliss.’ She sat down in the armchair, took her hat off, leaned back and smiled up at him.

He made a slight exclamation, as if he had run a splinter into his finger and stepped back into the room.

‘What is it? What is it?’

‘Nothing, only that you’re looking so lovely.’ He bit his lip, gave an awkward laugh, jerked his head over his shoulder at sounds of arrival in the hall, and went out.

She sank back in the chair, laid her cheek against the leather cushion, closed her eyes and murmured, ‘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 … Sometimes when I cannot sleep a wink or when I have to sit beside Hurrell for hours I think of all sorts of little things I have heard you say and little things I’ve watched you do, and they all fit into a picture … I am happy, I am very happy today, Sunflower … Nothing, only that you’re looking so lovely.’ He said that, he said that … She started up and looked at the desk to see if there were any photographs. There were none there or anywhere else in the room. She did not think there had been any upstairs in his bedroom either. She ranged round the room trying to find out more about him. She knew all the books he had in the library, she wanted to see what he had there. She could not bear to think there was anything about him she did not know. They were much the same kind of books that were in the library but shabbier, possibly the worst he had found in the house when he bought it, possibly some he had bought before he was really rich. This was evidently the place he came when he was in the mood that makes a woman want to go out in her oldest clothes; there was something obstinate and perversely unlike his ordinary habit of neatness in the way the papers were stacked on the desk, and it was perverse of him to be using the horrid little slit of a room at all, for it was in the north-west half of the house, and the green bank of the hillside rose only a few yards from the French windows. He was queer. Trying to lay hold of his queerness, she pried among his books, her hands shaking. She pulled out one red leather volume of Longfellow and found it was a prize that he had got for arithmetic at that school in Dulwich he had told them about that first time at dinner. There was a Scott bound in the same way just beside. And a Shelley. And a Wordsworth. They all had the same white label edged with gold pasted on the marbled flyleaf which said over the flourishing signature which failures use that it was a prize which had been awarded to Francis Pitt for arithmetic. She burst into nervous and delighted laughter, it was so just like Francis Pitt to have kept these prizes all these years. It was so utterly unlike Essington, who if he received any honour of any sort waved it away with a gesture of sick distaste, who if he were awarded a prize by any of those international committees of something dictated letters so shrilly squealing with annoyance that the secretaries went to unheard of lengths to delay posting them for a couple of days, who if he had found one of his school prizes would have rung the bell for it to be taken out as if it was something old that smelt. The idea of giving any prize seemed absurd to him in itself in view of the inadequacy of all human effort to cope with the human task. It was as if instead of building an ark Noah had met the warning of the flood by holding a swimming gala … But Francis Pitt was not like that. He was little and humble, he was not arrogant enough to criticise an established custom like prize-giving, he was so doubtful of himself that at the back of his mind he was glad to be able to say, ‘Well, anyway in 1895 I was first in arithmetic in the fourth form at Everett College, Dulwich.’ Of course it wasn’t as clever a way of going on as Essington’s but it was more useful. Since there wasn’t any society but human society for a human being to take part in what could a human being do if it lost patience with human society? You might as well put a rope round your neck. Poring over his comical and serviceable kind of nature she sought among the shelves for further traces of it. There was a shelf of those books, Casanova and Rabelais, that men have agreed are amusingly virile just as they have agreed that cricket matches are not dull; which is so much what you wouldn’t naturally think about them that you feel they made the agreement formally at a meeting in one of the older clubs, the kind where the senior members nearly died in the war because they had to have waitresses, and all signed their names to a long paper after lots of people who had been at the same school had proposed and seconded things. She had taken a look at the silly things. Casanova told the same sort of stories, only not so decent, that the favourite brother of the lady next door told the night when he turned up for the first time for fifteen years, and then the next morning they found that he hadn’t any money but expected to stay with them till he heard from a friend in New Zealand about a treasure hunt. And Rabelais. She had talked that over with Etta only the other day. ‘They’re always talking about Rabelais and how jolly he is, but you don’t ever come on them actually reading Rabelais, do you?’ ‘No, nor anything else either,’ Etta had replied tartly. ‘They don’t read half as much as they think they do.’ ‘No, they don’t, do they?’ She flung her arms the length of the shelf, rested her face on them and laughed at those books, and at some other things: the way he always looked badly dressed though he went to the best tailors and, if you thought, you could see it was because he would not let them make the shoulders broad enough nor cut the coat short enough to fit his queer little body, as he liked to pretend that he had a body like other men’s, not seeing that his was somehow better. A languor came on her so that she sank down on the floor, keeping her fingertips on the shelf, pressing her smiling mouth and drooped lids against the bare flesh of her arms. For some reason she felt as if her thirst for passivity were about to be quenched. The will inside her was like a spinning top, running down, running down; soon it would give a jerk and fall, twitch and lie still. She pulled herself up, and without troubling to open her eyes more than lash-deep swayed over to the armchair and threw herself down there, burying her face again in the leather. Inconsequently she thought of Alice Hester, the old woman whom she had seen tried for bigamy at the assizes, who when she was young (but not so very young after all) had been sought out by the man she loved where she waited in the darkness, not able to see the faces of her many children though she could hear them crying to her. He had turned the long ray of his lantern on the darkness and had shown her her children one by one …