Sunflower (7 page)

The tears were streaming down Sunflower’s face. She was amazed by them as by any other sudden and prodigious shower. She dried them with her gloves, for she had lost her handkerchief, as Essington said she always did, and she got up and pushed away the chairs, which seemed interested and resistant, and went out of the gallery into the passage. There she leaned against the yellow plaster wall, whose cold surface was like an admonition to be sensible, and tried to stop this independent weeping. Why should she cry! It was so foolish when Alice Hester had proved that everything was all right if only one had love, which meant that everything was really all right with her and Essington for they loved each other. If she told Essington about Alice Hester it would make him understand that they must stop being unkind to one another. She wished that she could tell him at once, without having to wait to get home. And then her heart sank, for she remembered that he had told her he would stay down at Evescote till Tuesday afternoon, which meant that she would not see him for another twenty-four hours. She could have cried again for disappointment. Things were always happening like this. If she found something in the newspapers that might make him laugh he was never there, and if she clipped it out and kept it then somehow it mattered too much if it turned out not funny enough to make him laugh; and when she woke up and laid her arm across the other pillow and said, ‘I have had such a lovely dream,’ it was always one of the nights he was not there. And his return to her house was never simple, like the coming home of an ordinary man, but always had to be announced, confirmed, altered, and maybe postponed by that maddening telephone, or to be waited for without any trust that any special hour would bring him. But these were little, little things compared with the adversities against which Alice Hester’s love had struggled and survived. She would never think of them again. And at any rate she could go and tell Harrowby. He was not married, she had often wondered why, for he was a very nice man. Perhaps he would get married when he heard this story.

She hurried back through the little rooms, whose drowsiness now seemed a curious affectation in view of the real, rushing nature of life. The hall was still full of groups of ordinary people, standing talking, their good heads lowered. For a little she stood and looked at them, smiling as one might at children who were taking some game very seriously but also wrung with pity because their own seriousness was paining them, and impatient because they had stood there looking down on the ugly linoleum when just behind the courtroom doors a woman had proved to all who cared to listen that no matter what happened life was all right. Regretfully she stroked her useless throat, thinking how bitter it was that with her trained voice she could have made them all hear every word she might have said, but that her stupid brain could not put two words together to convey the brightness that possessed her. But at any rate she could tell Harrowby. She hurried down the stairs and past the policemen, on whom she smiled with dazzling gratitude, since they had upheld the gates of her entrance into everlasting happiness, and she went out into one of these stage-scene hours that sometimes come between a sunlit day and its twilight. The townsfolk were walking in radiance over prodigiously lengthened shadows, like bold and happy souls not awed by any consequences; and in the upper windows of one half of the marketplace blazed a piecemeal sunset more glorious than that in the opposing sky. Under the assault of the strong slanting shafts of light no house-fronts seemed much more solid than canvas; the lit shops seemed factitious, sets for the harlequinade; pale householders stepped out of their doors and had ruddiness clapped on their faces as a mask. These appearances seemed to her confirmation of her belief that everything in the world had suddenly been changed by the disclosure of some knowledge, and that now all was well; and she almost ran to the garage to tell her news.

The yard also was wrought on by the hour. The two sides of it, the proprietor’s house and the opposite wall, were tepid in shadow, colder than one would have thought anything red could be; but the wall at the end glowed like the wings of a Painted Lady butterfly, and the gate in it seemed to have had its iron convolutions veneered with strips of sunset. The blossom on the lilac bough that bobbed over from the next garden had been dipped in a honey of thick yellow light. Pulled out into the middle of the yard was the Wolseley, its glossy sides suffused with fire in which reflections swam as dilating and contracting islets; and in it sat Harrowby, reading Captain Coe.

He jumped out when he saw her coming. ‘Did you find the place all right, Miss?’

‘Oh, Harrowby, I didn’t go! But I saw something much more wonderful! I went to see the people being tried in that place with a clock, because that nice old gentleman at Clussingford was the judge, and I saw the most wonderful thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Just think there was an old woman of seventy tried for committing bigamy last March …’ She had to stop and gasp for breath.

‘Dear, dear, Miss!’ commented Harrowby mildly, folding up the Star. ‘An old woman of seventy committing bigamy! That’s what I call carrying coals to Newcastle.’

‘Oh, but it was wonderful of her! She was the most wonderful person I’ve ever seen. Alice Hester her name was, and somehow it suited her. I don’t think she’d ever been beautiful. You felt she’d never had to bother about all that. But, oh, she looked so nice …’ She paused again for breath.

‘They often do,’ said Harrowby, who had evidently not yet found his equilibrium in the story.

‘She looked so good, and you felt she’d always been nice to everybody. And she’d had lots of children ever so long ago, and her husband turned them all out of doors, and a ploughman came and took them to a barn, and then they came here and pretended they were married, and they were awfully happy for forty years, though they weren’t married—’

‘Oh, that,’ said Harrowby, with a certain fierceness, ‘don’t matter any more nowadays. If people are straight, they are, and that’s that.’

‘Well, then he got ill, and he knew he was going to die, and he wanted to be married to her. And though there was a horrid sort of boy in the house, and she knew that he would tell, she did go and get married, though she knew that she’d get put in prison, and he was awfully happy, and he did die. Wasn’t it wonderful of her? Wasn’t it wonderful?’

‘Yes, indeed it was,’ said Harrowby. But it struck her that she had not told the story quite as well as she might have done, though on thinking it over she did not see that she had left out anything. So to clench matters she declared earnestly, ‘Really, Harrowby, she was the most wonderful person I’ve ever, ever seen!’ Then she saw she had impressed him, for he stared at her with large eyes and said, ‘It does you all the good in the world to take a day off, Miss,’ which was so irrelevant that he could only have said it to disguise his emotions. So that was all right.

She drew a deep breath of contentment and looked round her. ‘Isn’t it a lovely evening?’ she murmured. Her gaze ranged lovingly over everything, and came to the sash-windows in the proprietor’s house, with their shining panes and neat curtains of Nottingham lace. She smiled happily, for now she had seen Alice Hester she could be unreservedly happy about those people. It was quite likely that the little man would go on loving the ugly girl until he died. She said, ‘I’d like to say good-bye to that little man who was there.’

‘Well, I shouldn’t say there was much chance of seeing him this evening. There’s been a lot of coming and going since you went out. A domestic event, I should say. That’s the doctor’s car over there.’

They gazed up at the little house, which looked stern and knowing there in the shadow.

‘She’s very young,’ said Sunflower.

But Alice Hester must have been as young when she began, and it had turned out glorious for her.

‘I wish I knew if it were a boy or a girl,’ she speculated with a new shamelessness. ‘I’d like to send it something.’

They continued to gaze up at the grave little house.

‘We’d best be making a move,’ said Harrowby at length. ‘You’ll be getting tired, Miss. I’ve got to take you down to rehearsal tomorrow at eleven, I know.’

‘It’s funny. I am a little tired. But I’ve had a lovely, lovely day.’ She got into the car, and he settled the rugs round her. She would have her dinner in bed; a boiled egg, and some bread and honey.

II

WHEN Parkyns opened the door she said very quickly: ‘My lord is here. He came at six o’clock.’

‘Oh I am glad!’ exclaimed Sunflower. Now she would be able to tell him about Alice Hester at once. ‘Where is he?’

‘He is at dinner, Madam, and—’

But Sunflower threw down her gloves and bag on the hall-table, and ran right into the dining-room, which was silted up with late twilight. As she came from behind the draught-screen at the door Essington rose out of the tall chair at the head of the table, which was where she sat as a rule. She could not see his face; on the settee behind him burned the three candles that were as yet the only light in the room. She went to him, holding out her arms and crying, ‘Oh, darling! I’ve seen something so wonderful today! I went to the Assize Court in Packbury, and there was an old woman of seventy who had committed bigamy—’

But he kept silence, lowering his head a little, in the way which always meant that she had done something stupid and that he was not going to help her out of it. There was the sound of another chair being pushed backward. Why, there were two other people in the room. A broad-browed, middle-aged woman with straight black hair and an earthy skin looked up at her over the edge of a wineglass with a curious expression into which Sunflower stared for a moment; it was like the expression that might be exchanged between two servants waiting at table on a troublesome master. And at the foot of the table stood a little man with fox-coloured hair and a very big mouth, and queer eyes the colour of bad weather.

She put out her hand and exclaimed foolishly, ‘Oh, it’s you!’

He answered in a kind voice, very deep for such a little man, ‘Yes, it’s me.’ His hand was tiny, but very broad and strong.

She forgot her moment’s misgiving at Essington’s silence in happy wonder that after all these years she should meet this man again, this day of all days. It was odd that she had been thinking of him this very afternoon. It did seem as if life was suddenly revealing its own pattern. She would have liked to say, ‘Well, this is a small world, isn’t it!’ but Essington had impressed on her that, for some reason which she could not fully understand, the use of this and some other equally harmless phrases was far less permissible than the use of really bad language.

But Essington said: ‘You don’t know this gentleman. This is Mr Francis Pitt.’

Laughingly she protested, ‘But I do know Mr Pitt. We—sort of met years ago.’

A tremor ran through Essington. He seemed about to be angry in a different way. ‘What’s this?’ he spoke to Francis Pitt. ‘I thought you said you had never met?’

The little man gave a low chuckle. ‘Hardly met. We passed each other on the stairs when I was going down and Miss Fassendyll was coming up to the office of a War Charity, of which I was a Grand Panjandrum, a God knows what, and for which she did some real work.’ The chuckle ran right through his gruff speech, making it seem the very voice of kindly strength. She thought of the policeman who had found her crying in Hammersmith Broadway when silly old Grandaunt Annie had taken her out and lost her; he had bought her some pear drops and carried her all the way home. ‘I remember my eyes nearly fell out of my head, and evidently Miss Fassendyll remembers that too.’

She began to say, ‘Oh, no, it wasn’t that!’ but Essington had gone back to being angry in his first manner. ‘Dear Sunflower is as vague about the nature of an introduction as she is about everything else,’ he said; and then, suddenly remembering the sallow woman, waved his hand at her, ‘Miss Pitt, this is Miss Fassendyll.’ The sallow woman smiled and held out a hand so big and broad that it seemed odd that it should be smooth and white, in a manner at once genial and perfunctory, as if she wanted to be nice but was holding herself in readiness to climb a tree if hostilities became more acute. And then Essington went on: ‘I’ve been here since five. I told you I would be back here at tea-time on Monday. It’s half past eight now.’ His voice cracked. ‘I wrote a note from Evescote to say that I’d asked Miss Pitt and her brother to dine tonight. Of course you haven’t got it. We’re eating a scratch dinner that isn’t fit for a pig.’

His words failed him. His hand danced over the comminated table like something stung.

‘I’m sorry,’ she breathed.

‘Well, what does it mean? Where have you been? Who have you been with?’

She wet her lips. ‘I’ve been … at Packbury. Harrowby had to do something to the car. I went and listened to some cases. The time passed.’

‘It did,’ said Essington, ‘It did.’

‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. But really you didn’t say you were coming today. You said you were staying down at Evescote till Tuesday.’

‘I did not.’

‘But you wrote it.’ She tried to laugh. ‘Truly you did.’ She knew the way of dignity was to be silent; she knew that to defend herself was to crawl in the dust in the way of these strangers. But she was afraid that if she did not speak he would strike her. For she knew, as certainly as she knew that she would eventually die, that he would some day strike her. ‘Look, the letter’s up there on the mantelshelf, slipped into the mirror.’ Recollection of how gay she had been when she put it there, of how she had been moved to do so by her pride in one of his dear minor gifts, made her choke with a sense of trampled happiness. ‘I put it up there because your writing was so pretty.’

His eyes found the blue-grey envelope, beautiful as a Chinese print with the exquisite web of his serene and delicate handwriting. His head ducked. It was apparent that he remembered. But in a moment he recovered himself. ‘My God! How you love leaving letters about!’ he said.

‘There’s nothing in it but “Evescote” and your initials,’ she mumbled. She was shivering, partly because of her humiliation, partly because she was afraid that he had gone mad. There was a magical and ventriloquous quality about his rage. It was as if the voice that seemed to come out of his mouth came really from some lonely, bewitched and baying beast, far out in a desert. There was a silence, so she murmured, ‘I’ll go and tidy.’