The Beautiful Visit (41 page)

There was a knock on my door, and Mrs Lancing’s maid appeared to inquire whether I wanted any help. I accepted her aid gratefully, because we could then concentrate together on my
appearance; I need not think of anything else. As I put on the beautiful dress, I did think of poor Deborah and her gesture; but my mind shied away from her despair, because, in some way, I could
not help relating it to Rupert, about whom I did not wish to think. ‘You look a picture, Miss,’ said the maid, when I was finished.

Even this casual routine remark warmed me. I sent the maid away in order that I might collect myself in peace. I had meant to come to some decision, but my unusual appearance so fascinated and
overwhelmed me, that I simply stood foolishly before my mirror, abandoning myself to a detailed and intimate appraisal of my charms. I seemed to myself to have infinite possibilities . . . Then the
second bell rang.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

I sat through dinner with the extraordinary conviction of being someone else. I found it easy to talk; to amuse them; even to astonish them. They admired the dress, they all
admired it, and some of them asked why I had kept it so secret. Rupert said nothing. When I had entered the drawing-room he had been stretched out on the sofa, admiring the other women, and
drinking sherry. He had not immediately looked at me, as I advanced rather nervously, wishing that he would turn round and say something before everyone would notice what he said. Lucy had spoken
to me; he had turned his head, and ceased to smile. He had not said anything at all, but simply stared without speaking, while I walked to the fire and accepted my sherry; and then, when I had
turned towards him with the glass in my hand, looked away, whereupon conversation, which had virtually ceased, began again.

After dinner the women clustered upstairs for a final prink, before awaiting the first guests. Following Deb as we ascended, I accidentally trod on her stiff white satin skirt, from which the
train had been cut a little (although it was still much longer at the back than was usual or fashionable); and she turned to see that it was me. I apologized. She shook her head, signifying that it
was of no importance. I have a final picture of her there, half-way up the red staircase; very pale, all eyes, and throat, and dark massed hair; trembling a little from the cold, and with nothing
left to say to me.

When I came down again, I found Rupert waiting for me in the hall.

‘Will you, as I am unable to dance, allow me to take you in to supper?’

‘Yes. I cannot bear to think of supper now, but yes.’

‘You are not compelled to eat,’ he observed.

He had dispensed with his crutches, and was using a heavy but elegant stick, given him that morning by Mr Lancing. We walked to the big room together, at the door of which Lucy met us with a
bundle of dance programmes. Rupert declined one but Lucy insisted.

‘Of course you must. You can write down all the people you are going to talk to.’

‘Give me your programme then,’ said Rupert to me. ‘I shall enter your one sedentary appointment in it.’

‘May
I
come and talk to you, Rupert?’ said Elspeth.

She was rather unexpectedly wearing yellow chiffon. Rupert and she continued talking, while I was swept away by Mrs Lancing, who always felt that it was a mistake for people who knew each other,
to talk together at parties.

‘Here is someone you
don’t
know!’ she announced triumphantly. ‘Mr Fielding. He is devoted to music.’ And she abandoned us.

I remembered that I had met Mr Fielding before, but he did not seem to recollect me; and on the point of reminding him, I restrained myself. I must have altered beyond recognition, I reflected
with sudden pleasure.

‘I don’t know why Mrs Lancing thinks I like music. I don’t. Never have. Are you very musical or something?’

I assured him earnestly that I was not, and he seemed relieved.

‘That’s something anyway,’ he said, and then, aware that he had not said what he meant in the most tactful manner, added, ‘I say, I didn’t mean that. “Things
that might have been expressed differently,” what? That’s a ripping dress. I mean it,’ he added, anxious to reassure me. ‘Look here, shall we set the ball rolling? Someone
has to make a start.’

So we danced. There were twelve dances before the supper interval; and I was never without a partner. It was very odd, I reflected; on my previous visit I had been overwhelmingly anxious to be a
success, had been disposed deeply to enjoy it if I were, or passionately to despair if I were not; but now, I floated through the evening with the utmost ease. I seemed not to
be
myself, but
simply a successful reflection of all my partners. This, I found, generally speaking, constituted success.

I discoursed eagerly about fox hunting with one partner; and as vehemently deplored it with the next. I adored London; I loathed it. I agreed that dancing had disintegrated into something
utterly ungraceful; I wearied of the old waltzes and longed for even further developments of ragtime. I was devoted to animals and interested in their welfare; then thought that far too much fuss
was made of them which could be better devoted to people. Many of my partners considered me intelligent, and frankly said so. When I thought at all, it was about Rupert and the supper interval,
which was divided from me by fewer and fewer dances, and which I had begun to dread.

When the moment finally arrived, Rupert was nowhere to be seen, and glad of a few minutes alone, I slipped away from the dancing, along the passage to the library, which was not being used that
night, except as a depository for men’s coats. A light was on in the room, but I entered it without thinking. I found a fire burning, Rupert seated on a stool before it, and a small table
covered with supper for two people beside him.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were here,’ I said foolishly.

‘Has the supper started? I meant to come to fetch you on the stroke of eleven. Now, in fact,’ he said, as the clock struck.

‘Yes. I came here . . . I just came.’

‘Very good thing. Shut the door, and come and eat.’

‘Is that for us?’

‘Of course. I made it for us. Wild with jealousy, I have limped about preparing a pathetic repast. Are you touched?’

‘You meant to amuse, not touch me,’ I replied moving uncertainly towards him.

‘And I haven’t done either. Do I ever?’

‘Amuse or touch me?’

‘No don’t answer yet, until you have had some wine.’ He poured it into two glasses.

‘What is it?’

‘Champagne – especially good champagne for us.’

At last I was drinking champagne, I thought, and remembered the two occasions when I had not.

‘
Now
what are you thinking?’

‘Nothing. I have never drunk champagne before,’ I said.

The whole situation, the firelight, the little table, the slightly unexpected seclusion, was a shock to me, and I was uncertain whether I could sustain it.

‘Do you feel like eating?’

‘Not very.’

‘Nor do I.’ He suddenly drained his glass. ‘I have the uneasy feeling with you that while I am quite ignorant of what is in your mind, you know exactly what I am going to say.
Do you?’

I raised my eyes to him. ‘I think I know what you are going to say; but I have not the smallest idea why you are going to say it.’

‘Isn’t that rather coy of you?’

‘It wasn’t meant to be,’ I said, and in my embarrassment drank the rest of my champagne.

‘Well, perhaps I had better attempt some sort of explanation; although I may as well warn you it will be neither explicit nor particularly illuminating. You have always, to me, ever since
I first met you, seemed possessed of a potential capacity for life which I am quite without. I did not value this when I met you here, because I did not know myself how much I was without it; nor
when you ran away to my studio, because then I was obsessed with my own problems. I just thought you over sensitive but delightful. It seemed to me that you wanted to get away from your home much
in the spirit that I wanted to stop being a doctor. Things were simple for me then; not pleasant, but simple. I stopped being a doctor because the dazzling alternative was being a painter. I then
found that this in turn produced the less dazzling alternative of becoming a soldier. That is how I saw it then, you understand. I was sorry for you when you came to the studio, but I felt quite
unable to do anything about you; and also slightly afraid that you would depend on me if I did. Painting was not at all what I had expected it to be, and so becoming a soldier did not seem, on the
face of it, too bad a prospect. It took me about a year to discover how much I hated the whole thing; and by then I couldn’t get away from it. I mean
I
couldn’t. I hadn’t
the initiative to walk out, or the kind of desperate strength of mind to stop a blighty one. I just hung on, and lost my self-respect. At first I thought we should win quickly; then not for a long
time; and finally that we should lose, but long after it didn’t matter. I didn’t care in the least. Nearly all my friends got killed, or worse, and then I had this leg trouble. Weeks
and weeks of cheerful quiet and filthy smells, in a hospital. In hospital I began to think about you, and wondered whether, in order to escape your home, you had become a nurse. That would finish
her, I thought, just about as much as soldiering’s finished me. If you do a job for months and years which shatters the sensibility without in any way strengthening the intellect (and most
people do that, war, or no war), you really are not worth more than the creature comforts a government or an employer accords you; down to the shortest possible telegram announcing your death, or
everyone getting drunk for a night because you have survived. Anyhow, for some weeks I lay in bed, thinking a little about you, and concluding, quite wrongly, that you had probably been reduced to
the same state as I. I suppose I wanted to think that. That is why I arrived at your house. I didn’t expect you to mind. I talked to your mother, who didn’t seem to know anything about
you, but was obviously very relieved to see me. She seemed to regard me as the answer to a mother’s prayer. Then you appeared I couldn’t understand you then, and I don’t now. At
first, I thought that
you
had been very unhappy, and then I changed my mind. You would not have come here for Christmas, where you had not seemed to enjoy yourself very much before, if you
were very unhappy. Then I thought that perhaps, although you had not lost your sensibility, you had begun to lose hope about escaping from your dreary home. And then I began to see the least I
could do about it. And now we are sitting here, and I am asking you to marry me.’

There was a silence; during which I wondered where to begin. I felt he had not told me anything at all, anything, at least, that I wanted to hear. And a good deal of what he thought about me was
simply wrong. No point in telling him that.

‘Well?’ he asked.

‘I am afraid I still don’t see why you want to marry me.’

‘I told you my explanation would not be very illuminating. You do not seem very surprised, by the way.’

‘Did you expect me to be surprised?’

‘No,’ he said, after a moment’s thought. ‘No, I suppose not. Well, if you can think of anything more to ask me, I’ll try and answer honestly.’

‘What do you propose to do, if I marry you?’

‘I have considered that very carefully. I shall give up painting and accept my father’s offer. It means living with him, but it is a large house and there would be plenty of room. I
very much doubt my ability to earn enough money for two people as an artist; and in any case, after staying here, I am sure it is better to live in the country. Life is much simpler, safer too, I
think. And better for children. Do you know Norfolk at all?’

‘Not at all,’ I answered politely. We really might have been two complete strangers conversing in a train.

‘It is very flat where we should live. On the edge of a salt marsh. The country stretches flat to the sky, and green, greener than any other part of England. There are small ridges beside
the dykes, and windmills standing about, and long narrow roads running dead straight; but otherwise, it is simply miles and miles of soft wet green marsh, with geese in winter, and cows all the
year round. To the people who know it well, it is the most beautiful county of all.’

‘I don’t know it,’ I repeated. I was not in a frame of mind receptive to the emotional appeal of landscape.

‘I thought you minded so much about painting,’ I added. I remembered his outburst to me in the studio; it was almost impossible to believe that this was the same man.

‘Oh yes,’ he laughed shortly. ‘I expect I was very fluent and intellectual about art when we met before. That should have warned you. Good artists are seldom good at talking
about it; they simply get on with the job. Perhaps they have a larger share of animal intuition than most, but very little intellect. If they start talking about it, start relating it to life in
any more than the grand, emotional, or intuitive manner, there is trouble at once. They start analysing their work, and find that there is nothing there. And then they are confounded.’

‘Of course there are exceptions,’ I said.

‘Of course there are exceptions. There are, fortunately, always exceptions. They are the only thing which prevents anyone knowing everything about anything. I was talking about the kind of
artist which I might have aimed at being. And you see, it’s no good. I’ve done too many other things and talked too much. I’m not single-minded enough. My mind is too
divided.’

‘So you would not paint anyway?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean you would not paint whether I married you or not.’

‘Oh I see. No. No, you need have no fear that you are corrupting a fine artist into a breadwinner. None of that. Have some more champagne?’

‘Thank you. But you still have not, so far as I can see, produced a single reason for wanting to marry me, more than anyone else.’

‘Isn’t the fact that I am asking
you
, and not, shall we say, Elinor, sufficient reason?’