The Balliols (42 page)

She was gone as dramatically as she had come. Balliol's eyes followed as she scuttled away at the tripping pace that made him expect that every step she would fall forward on her face.

“Have you any idea who that is?” he asked.

“None.”

“I suppose that in the course of time Hugh will enlighten us.”

Said Jane: “I may be quite wrong, of course. One can't see very clearly in this light, one shouldn't judge anyone hastily, but I must say that I believe that girl wore make-up.”

Through a window misted with heat and smoke, Hugh Balliol watched the oast-houses of west Kent take on colour and distinctness in the morning light. It was nearly two years since he had made this journey; since this journey had been a part of his life's ordinary routine; since he had talked casually of “having to run over to
France this week to see our shippers” when friends had asked him to do this or that. How surprised he would have been had he been told, when he made that last journey in the spring of 1914, that it would be twenty months before he would see Napoleon's column over the hills behind Boulogne; and then as an officer, in khaki, on his way to a front-line trench. He wondered how long it would be before he saw it again, in civilian clothes, as a London merchant, carrying his little attaché case with its pile of invoices. He wondered, but with no precise sense of time. You could not look that far ahead. You enlisted for the duration. You lived for the duration. “Après la guerre.” The troops might sing their “When this bloody war is over” but that was a time distant beyond computation. You could see, you could plan, no further than your next leave. If he were back in those days when you could say, at a moment of indecision, “Yes, this may be all very well now, but how shall I be feeling about it in ten years' time?” would he be engaged to a girl that he'd known three months, that he'd met six times? There'd have been interviews with parents, considerings of ways and means, the slow ritual of courtship, a careful test of the ground, with love unfolding slowly; not this eager, hungry snatching at fruit that might know no morrow. That's how it would have been.

Or wouldn't it? Might there not even in those sheltered days have been a wooing as hasty, as precipitate? Hadn't people fallen in love at a first meeting, when they had a century to make love in? Wouldn't he have fallen in love with her just the same, even if there hadn't been a war? Wasn't it only that the war made it easier, gave him the right to rush his fences?” Wasn't it simply the war made the setting different, gave one different opportunities?

I'd have met her at some rather formal dance, in the country. There'd have been an introduction. “Joyce dear, I want you to meet Hugh Balliol. Miss Joyce Barrington.” He'd have bowed stiffly from the waist. He would have asked her if he could have the pleasure of a dance. Number seven, she would have told him. During dance six he would have thought “‘Blue dress'—who's this I've got to dance the next with? There are three blue dresses that I've met already.” When the music for the seventh dance began he would have stood looking for a girl who seemed familiar and who seemed to have no partner, to whom after such an interval as seemed appropriate, he would walk across. “I believe that this is ours?”

He would lead her away from the wall, into the music, he would
be thinking, “Really, this kind of dance is far more trouble than it's worth, making conversation to someone one doesn't know.” As they danced he would open the kind of conversation that one reserves for partners at dances in the country, and she would answer in the manner that was prescribed for young women, to whom strange young men from London had been presented. Just like any other dance. Till suddenly, to his surprise, he would find that after all he was not making conversation; that he was talking easily, and enjoying talking; that he was anxious to make an effect; that he had begun to wonder about his partner; who she was, what she was, what were her interests, her ambitions; that he became impatient with the ritual dance programmes and introductions that fixed you to one dance and one dance only with a girl that you met for the first time; for the knowledge that so late as an eighth dance it was not possible to ask if she had another dance unmortgaged. “Nothing before the fourth extra,” she would say. And hours before then his party would have insisted on his going back home. “But I've got to see her again. I've got to find out about her. This isn't going to end here. I've got to find out what she's really like.”

That's how it would have been if he had met her in a normal atmosphere, when it might have taken him a year or eighteen months to get to know her, when any step had to be taken thoughtfully.

Nothing could have been more different from that, externally, than the whirlwind courtship that had just ended in his proposal and its acceptance. Yet the essential situation was the same.

He had met her to the sound of music; only it had not been at a hunt ball in the Shires, but at a crowded restaurant in London. There had been the same reluctance at the start. He had just come up from Grantham for a week-end leave. He and another officer. They had decided to make a night of it; to order the best dinner that a London restaurant had upon its menu; then “see life.” He had been resentful when another officer, a man in the same mess, whom he rather liked, had come across to him towards the end of dinner with the request that they should join up with his party afterwards. Two of his party had had their leaves cancelled at the last moment. They were two girls too many. Their whole evening was being spoilt; it ought to have been such fun. It could be such fun. It would be, if only Hugh would come across.

Hugh had resented the interference with his plans. “What kind of girls were they?” he had asked.

“Very jolly. Lots of fun and really pretty. Everard's sister.…”

But that was enough for Hugh. He didn't want that kind of party. People's sisters indeed! He wanted to enjoy himself, “see life.”

“Oh, but come on. Be a sport,” it had been insisted. “It'll be fun, really it will. I promise you. And if you don't enjoy yourself, you can always go. You can make some excuse. I won't try and keep you. Give it a chance, anyhow.”

In the end, reluctantly, Hugh had yielded. And to begin with, it had been, just as the hunt ball would have been, a tedium and a strain. There were strange faces. There were introductions. There was a flow of talk from which he felt himself excluded because he had not the necessary links with it of mutual friends and settings. There was the making of conversation. There were the attempts at dancing, impossibly unsatisfactory on that narrow, crowded floor. “How soon can I decently get out of this?”

But, just as at the hunt ball he would have realized that he was talking, not making conversation, so now imperceptibly he grew aware that his attention was being held, his interest roused by a girl seated across the table, whose name when they had been introduced he had not caught. She was dark-haired, pale-skinned; her eyes very dark and bright. Her teeth were very white and even; her lips were parted. She was talking quickly, in a low, eager ripple. She appeared completely absorbed in her conversation. Yet Hugh had the feeling that she was aware of him in the same way that he was aware of her, though they had not exchanged a word, though she had not once looked at him. He became interested, alert, curious. He felt resentful of the conditions of a party of this kind where you were introduced to girls, but had no chance of talking to them, where there was the width of a table in between; where the dance floor was so crowded that dancing was scarcely possible; where it was impossible if you were interested in any one person, to see them more than a little, since their place in the evening was already made, since you couldn't break in upon another person's party. “I wonder what she's like.”

And then suddenly she turned away from the man beside her, she looked at him, their eyes met in a long steady glance that turned to a half smile of recognition before she turned away. He was startlingly conscious of being alive in every sense. “I've got to see her. I've got to find out about her. This isn't going to end here. I've got to find out what she's really like.”

If he had felt that way about a girl met at a hunt ball, he would have made inquiries about her among friends; he would have found out the houses that she frequented; he would have got himself invited to some party she would be at, or asked some friend to arrange a meeting that would appear casual, unforeseen. That's how it would have been in the country, in the days of peace, when there was leisure for slow growth. But in the hothouse atmosphere of war-time London, you did not postpone things to a morrow that might never dawn. Hugh pushed back his chair. He walked round the table. “Shall we dance?” he asked the girl.

The dance was an excuse. They had agreed, all of them, that dancing was impossible; that it would be the wise thing to wait till the floor was empty. But the girl had risen to her feet. She looked up at him as they stood on the edge of the cleared floor. She smiled. He put his arm round her. He was conscious of softness, pliancy; of an electric feeling of vitality. The music had a barbaric stridency. His feet twitched to respond to it, to be lost with her in the music's rhythm. It would be heaven to dance with her. One half turn of the room showed him how impossible that was. They could not dance. All that any of the dancers could do was to shuffle their feet and sway their shoulders. There was an excuse for contact, that was all. And Hugh wanted more than that. He wanted to dance, really dance.

“This isn't any good.”

“Not any.”

“Why don't we go out to-morrow somewhere where we can really dance?”

“I'd like that.”

That was how it had begun. That was how it had continued; with the sense of being alive quickening with every hour he spent with her. Not merely, not only rather, through the heightened stirring of the senses, but through the feeling that everything was more fun because she was there; everything was more amusing, more interesting. He talked more easily, he talked better. He had a new ease and confidence. The reflection of her response to him. He was only alive when he was with her. The times when he was away from her were sandy tracts of desert. He was, in fact, in love.

“And I shouldn't be any the less in love if I'd been wooing her for eighteen months. The war telescopes things. It's a hothouse atmosphere. It brings things to fruit quickly. But it's the same plant.
It's just that the setting's different. People'll say—old people—that it's madness for us to marry having known each other for so short a time. But every marriage is a gamble; must be, in the nature of things. We are as likely to be making a success of marriage in 1950 as any couple that have grown up in the same village and haven't a secret from one another. We know our minds quicker now, that's all.”

Thus he argued with himself, picturing himself a father and a husband; thirty-five years ahead.

But those were the arguments that he had rehearsed to convince the inherited cautionary instincts that regarded marriage as a stage in a logical process of self-establishment. They were the arguments that he would use to his father, to Joyce's father. Himself he did not look ahead. He did not picture as the mid-Victorian fiancé did, a future of firesides and cradles; the wage-earner returning from his office at the day's end to the bosom of his family; the son trotting at his father's side; the son bringing home from school and college, later from the larger arena of life, the prizes which old men in their clubs vie with one another in comparing—nor did his imagination paint such a picture as had he fallen in love three years earlier, he would have made out of changed circumstance—a home of his own; a flat first, then a house; the fun of entertaining; the status of a married man; the pride of taking out a pretty wife; of going down into the country for week-ends; his old life, only pleasanter.

Hugh Balliol did not attempt to visualize the life that he and Joyce, when the war was over, would build up together. That was too far ahead. His vision was prescribed by the immediate future. No man could look further ahead than his next leave. And it was of his next leave, that would be his honeymoon, that picture after picture flickered before his eyes. The wedding by special licence, within forty-eight hours of his return; the little restaurant lunch party, the speech or two; all that as a prelude: the twelve halcyon days that they would spend in London, since London was the one place that weather could not spoil. They would take a suite at the Savoy, looking out over the Embankment. The windows would be banked with flowers. For that one fortnight they would consider nothing but themselves. They would tie themselves down to nothing. They would act as the mood moved them. If it were summer and the day was fine they would motor down to Taplow, leave the car beside the river, hire an electric canoe, picnic through a long afternoon in shadowed backwaters; or maybe it would be in the
early spring, or autumn. It would be too late or early for the river. On days when the sky was grey but the clouds were moving too quickly for a fall of rain, they would motor out to Addington or Wentworth, for a long day's golf, returning when the skies were darkening, when lights were waking between close-curtained, close-shuttered windows, when streets had the strange mysterious appeal of war-time London; the darkened lamps flinging their spreading cones upon the pavement. There would be restaurants and theatres, bright lights, gay frocks and music; a kaleidoscope of changing scenes. One thing upon another. Yet all that change of scene, the animation, the excitement, people and noise and music, would be the background to the hours when they would be alone together; in the flower-decked suite that looked on to the curving river.

But that he could not picture. His mind showed him no mental photographs.
That
was an untravelled country; a mystery that he could guess at, but not visualize. One thing alone he knew for certain: that it would be utterly different from anything he had ever known; the casual wild nights in London, Paris, or during his time in camp, at Nottingham and Watford, they had been fun enough. They had been exciting in their way. They had added their savour to a week-end leave, to a business trip to Paris, but how could they be expected to compare with this? To Joyce, someone of one's own world, somebody that one really loved. He trod the threshold of initiation.