The Balliols (37 page)

She did not look ahead till the time when Victor's battery would be sent to France. He had told her, vaguely, that he expected to be sent out in the early spring. The divisional general was very pleased with them, it seemed. They had trained on faster than had been expected. It was the ambition of every man, of every unit, to be declared fit for active service at the earliest possible moment. She had listened to such talk with a feeling of pride for him. Yes, he'll be going soon. And I'll have to fill the interval, in the only way that I can fill it, with hard work. I'll know all about a car by then. Perhaps they'll let me go out to France, as a lorry driver or with an ambulance, possibly for Y.M.C.A. work. I'll do all that I can,
then
. I must have this time first.

Any time now he would be coming back for his last leave, he told her. There would be that; and after that, the need for courage, “fortitude and delicacy.” But there would be that week first.

It was in April that he expected that last leave. It was in the last week of March that two days of gathering alarm left her three days later with a terrifying certainty. But I can't, she thought. It can't be true. Things like that happen to other people, not to oneself. For
me
to have a child! But it isn't possible. What shall I do? My father and mother… how can I ever tell them? But it can't be. Not now. There were those first months when I was frightened. But then when nothing happened I thought it was all right. I didn't worry. I suppose we were careless sometimes. Oh, but it can't be true, it can't!

Yet she knew it was.

For a day she lost her nerve. She rang up the canteen to tell them that she was ill. She mooned about the streets, not knowing what she was doing, buying things she did not want, walking into a restaurant, ordering a dish; finding she was not hungry; leaving it untasted; taking a ticket at a cinema; finding that the film bored her, coming out at once. What am I going to do? What am I going to do?

For a day or two it went on like that. Then she pulled herself together. She did not yet know what she was going to do, but she knew what she was not going to do. She was not going to let Victor know.

It was a decision due in part to a feeling of personal pride, the resolve not to make a nuisance of herself, to give no one the right to think of her as tiresome; in part the wish that this honeymoon time of hers should not be spoilt for Victor, that he should be able to look on it with unalloyed happiness, so that he would regret her when other women came into his life, so that he would compare those other women with her, thinking “Yes, but that was better”; so that when in his old age he looked back on the love affairs that had filled his life it was of her that he would think first. “There's been no one quite like her. There's never been anything quite like that.” It was to that in part that her resolve was due: considerations that at any other time would have directed the conduct of a girl with a temperament such as hers.

But in this hour when life was more highly geared, more sensitive, more emotionalized, that same spirit of sacrifice which was sending men to Flanders in eager welcoming of a fate that might destroy them, turned for Ruth a duty that would have been accepted with a Stoic resignation, endured with “fortitude and delicacy,” into a destiny to be met with pride and happiness, since she could sacrifice herself in her woman's way for those who in their men's way were sacrificing themselves for her and for their country. A surrendering, as theirs was, of her security of future, a saying “If in any way I can make your lot less difficult, make use of me. If I have anything to give, however small, take it, it is yours”; a spendthrift giving, a reckless scattering of self.

When in the first week of April the postcard came “Euston 12.50 Thursday” she had one thought only; to make that last leave as cloudless as she could. No thought of her trouble, her future,
must cloud that happiness. It must be unalloyed. He would have need of the memory of such happiness in the country that he was bound for. Perhaps—who knew?—the hours he had spent with her would serve as an amulet when the dark hour came.

To her surprise, however, she by no means found Victor in the holiday, carefree mood that she had expected. His face wore a preoccupied expression. His conversation gave the impression that he was following his own train of thought, that he was according only a minute part of his attention to their discussion of the plays that they would have to see during this one week. His manner was so unusual that she could scarcely avoid taking notice of it.

“What's the matter, Victor? Are you worried about something?”

He shook his head, smiled quickly; blinked; as though he were waking himself out of a trance. Then once again and for the first time there came into his eyes the intimate, affectionate, familiar smile.

“I've got something rather difficult to ask you. I don't quite know how to put it.”

“Well, what is it?”

“I was going to propose to you.”

“What!”

“You needn't look so surprised.”

But it was no good his saying that. She was not surprised, she was dumbfounded. Marriage was the one thing that she had never contemplated in connection with herself and Victor. He would marry some day, she knew that. Someone out of his own world. It might be a romantic marriage. It would certainly be a marriage of mutually held tastes and interests, of obligations recognized on both sides; things that did not need explaining. There were women who were trained, were educated, to fulfil the responsibilities that would be required by the wife of such a person as Victor Tavenham.
She
wasn't that kind of person. Nothing had ever astonished her so much as this proposal. In a way it embarrassed her. It was outside the rhythm of their relationship. She half resented it. It put her in a false position. It was the kind of situation that she herself had been at such particular pains to avoid.

“I don't begin to understand,” she said.

“We've known each other a good while now.”

“That's different.”

“In less than a fortnight now I'll be going over.”

So that was it, then. He had a feeling of responsibility about her. He was going to the war. He might never come back. He had the means of making her life easier and pleasanter. Which he had, far more than he suspected. And it was dear of him to have felt that way about her. It showed that he had really cared. But she was not going to accept a proposal made in that spirit, inspired by a sense of responsibility; particularly from him, particularly at such a time. It was too final, like the making of a will, as though he were saying, “There's no need for me to come back now.” Almost as though he were not wanting to come back, because the prospect of coming back to a life with her was out of tune with his life as he had planned it. And, no, she thought, it isn't any good. I can't marry him that way. I'll tell him that I don't want to settle down, that I want my freedom, that I want to look round a little further first. Something like that, something that'll take away that worry of responsibility so that we can go back to what we were; so that we can be care-free and light-hearted: let this week-end be perfect. Then, when he's gone, I'll find some way of settling up my troubles so that my shoulder will bear the weight; so that he'll never know; so that when he comes back I'll make his leaves fun for him. That's how it's going to be, that's how it's got to be.

But he was smiling at her, in a new fond way and his voice had a new tenderness.

“I don't want to talk dramatically,” he said, “but going to a war isn't like going on a cricket tour. I may not come back. I'm an only son. My name's stood for something. I don't want it to die out.”

If he had surprised her when he proposed, now by the reason for that proposal he even more surprised her. But in a different way.

“You mean…?”

She paused. The idea was so new, so astonishingly new to her.

“But, Victor, darling, there are… I mean, if you are looking at it that way… There are so many other girls… who'd be… oh, I don't know… so very much more suitable.”

He smiled away her protests.

“I want a son. I want my son to be a man. If I'm not going to make him a man myself I want him to be in the hands of someone I can trust. I want him to have a mother he can respect: someone who doesn't know what playing crooked means.”

“Victor…”

But she could not trust herself to speak. The colour was flooding into her cheeks. She blinked her eyes. That he, that he of all people, should feel about her in that way. And if that was the way he felt… why, yes… oh, yes… oh, yes.

If Ruth's surprise had been considerable when Victor had proposed to her, her family's when she announced her engagement to him was complete. There was a dead silence. Then a rapid, machine-gun spatter of questions.

Said her father: “In the vernacular of the lower orders you could knock me over with a feather!”

Helen asked if she could be a bridesmaid at the wedding.

Francis thought it would be fun to have a rich brother-in-law. “Won't it impress the fellows! I bet he tips me jolly well.”

Hugh was frankly inquisitive. How long had she known him? When had she been seeing him?

“When I took you to that party of his last summer, you said you'd never met him.”

“I know. It began then.”

Said her father: “Was it what the novelists of my generation described as Love at First Sight?”

For once it was her mother who put the most practical question:

“When are you going to be married?”

“On Monday.”

“What!”

“Victor's getting a special licence. I'm going down to-morrow to spend the week-end at Tavenham to see his father. Then you'll all come down for it on the Monday.”

Said Francis: “That means I'll get a day off from school.”

Hugh supposed that it would be a very quiet show.

“There'll be bridesmaids, won't there?” asked Helen anxiously.

“You shall carry my bouquet all right,” Ruth assured her.

“And what about Ruth's room?” said Francis. “I wonder if I could make a workshop of it, now that she won't want it any longer.…”

“There was in my childhood, Francis, and probably in yours, a proverb about not counting unhatched chickens,” his father warned him. “I expect Ruth will be very glad to have somewhere in London to keep her things till she has a house of her own in London.”

“Oh.… Still, bags I that room when the war's over. By the way, how old is the old boy?”

“If you mean Lord Huntercoombe, I should say close on seventy.”

“Um… well, that's not too bad. I shall like talking about my brother-in-law, Lord Huntercoombe.”

There was a burst of reproving laughter.

“All the same,” said Hugh, “it is rather strange to think of Ruth being the Viscountess Huntercoombe.”

It seemed rather strange to Ruth. She had not somehow visualized herself as Lady Huntercoombe. She had thought of herself as Victor's wife.

On the next day she and Victor drove down to Tavenham. When he opened the door of the car, she moved over to the wheel. “I'll show you how well I can drive,” she said.

He hesitated. Lady drivers were a favourite butt of the cartoonist. Then the quick, interested look came into his eyes.

“All right. I'll have my hand near the brake in case anything too awful happens.”

But he had no need to touch the hand brake, and before they had been driving for ten minutes the interested look had left his face. “That's all right. You know how to drive. I'll take the wheel now. It's a longish journey. I don't want you to be tired out.”

With Victor at the wheel the speed of the car rapidly increased and more than once the hand brake was tugged back with a sudden jerk.

It was the first time that Ruth had been to Tavenham. The Tavenhams were of solid, county stock, who had been ennobled in the last years of the seventeenth century for services to William the Third of a possibly questionable nature. Their ennoblement had altered their character very little. They had not influenced the history they had lived through. No Huntercoombe had made a speech in the House of Lords. Victor's father had kept saying that he really ought to do something about Lloyd George's budget “just to show those fools in London how the country really thinks,” but when the time had come there had been a point-to-point that he could not miss. “One has certain responsibilities, damn it.” The Tavenhams had accepted history but had not made it. They had sent ensigns to the wars who had returned captains. Certain “bad hats” had been despatched to such colonies as the exigencies of the time selected: Barbados in the eighteenth, Australia in the nineteenth centuries.
Their sons had been born to the feudal tradition of the aristocracy that prescribed a period of wild oats as a prelude to the sober responsibilities of a seat and title. They looked on London as a glorified Luna Park, where you dined and drank and drabbed where it did not much matter what you did since no one who mattered saw you. In the county you had a position to keep up. You could only maintain the respect of your tenants by observing the conventions: Church going, charities, a firm hand but a kind one; riding your village as you rode a horse. That was how the Tavenhams had lived. And the house that they had built in the last years of the seventeenth century was the symbol and expression of that life.

To her surprise Ruth found that Tavenham reminded her of Ilex. It was long, two-storied, with a low roof; with high rectangular windows, white-shuttered and white-framed; with a portico at the head of a short flight of steps that was scarcely more than an elaborate window frame. There were no creepers on the front. The brickwork had been recently repointed. It had so fresh, new-minted an appearance that apart from its setting, it might have seemed as recent, if not actually more recent, than Ilex. It needed its setting to explain it. Just as Ilex and the life of its inhabitants was explained by the noisy, wheel-polished sweep of the North End Road, by the row of numbered villas reaching to the hill's foot, by the pavement, the street lamps, the few poor trees, so was Tavenham explained by the wide parkland stretching from the lodge gates to the dower house, two miles away; by the broad avenues of chestnuts planted by men who could look a hundred years ahead, by the lake, bordered with early flowers, that trailed into a stream midway between the garden and the drive; by the two swans drifting statelily between clumps of water-lilies; the placidly grazing sheep; the trimmed yew hedges that flanked the rose garden, the huddled group of outbuildings; stables, sheds, their thatched roofs showing over the wall of the kitchen garden; the air of spaciousness, of leisure, of life growing wide and deep.