The Dangerous Years (22 page)

Paris joined the conspiracy, closing round them with a secrecy, as they believed, their ears deaf, their eyes blind, to everything except this immediate rapture. For it was all so gentle; the agony of the senses lulled by tenderness, by surprise at so late a companionship, and so sweet a tolerance and understanding. Both were too old, too grateful, to be clumsy in their demands and their demonstration. Every touch, every kiss and even the wild moments of final intimacy, were touched by the grace of contrast, of old comparisons, of all the skills of time. What both had lost, in death, betrayal, brutal and worldly demands, now came back to them, a redoubled treasury, on which they could draw to enhance the present, to give it the illusion of permanence and fulfilment.

The days and nights, wind-blown and wild, flew over them, leaving their hearts unruffled. The calmness at the centre was, perhaps, the most acceptable quality in this relationship. It dwarfed reality, especially the problems near at hand, and in so doing, withdrew also the characters and facts with whom the lovers would normally have been in contact.

One day, over a week since this isolated idyll began, the dear infatuates spent a morning in the Louvre. The very walls of the galleries were sharers of their happiness, closing them round with a privacy that ignored the crowds of picture-gazers. At every window of the palace the wind moaned and rattled, and human figures struggled
obliquely across the open spaces of the gardens below.

The lovers found the Corot rooms, and Mary began to discourse with enthusiasm, seeing the work of this lyrical genius with an increased appreciation, fed by her own recent enlargment. Batten moved round with her, seemingly stolid, his hand under her arm, gently moulding it, usurping half his intelligence by its sensuous enjoyment of the rounded beauty of Mary's wrist and forearm. His attention to her words was thus somewhat perfunctory. He could appreciate the painting too, he told himself, but here was something more commanding, more his own. He looked at her from time to time, while listening to her clever words (for what she lacked in musical apprehension, she made up in visual consciousness). What he saw was good to his eyes; the grace of her person, the perfect taste in clothes, a result of her sense of colour and form; the still appealing womanliness expressing itself in every aspect of her features and figure. He congratulated himself, and grew young again.

“Go on, Mary,” he murmured, while she waited, amused by his abstract air before a picture which she had been analysing, trying to show him certain premonitory signs of the methods of the Impressionists. “It's good to hear you, my darling.”

He had no need to be so intense about it, she thought, observing the slight hoarseness in his voice, and the increased pressure of his warm hand through her sleeve. But her nerves, her whole body, responded with jubilation, and she turned to him, passion silencing mind for several moments, while the universe rolled on, and creation gazed upon itself. But at the back of this magic lay the hopelessness of all things out of their time, all belated riches, all those reminders of too much knowledge, murmuring of despair.

“You
must
listen,” she said, at last, returning from that primeval world to the more serene fields of art. And
Batten bowed his head, knowing she was right, though neither of them willingly assented.

So the morning passed, like those preceding and to follow it, with recklessness only increased by restraint, the lovers knowing that when night came they would repay each other these half-hearted savings from the hours of daylight.

With common-sense suspended, neither Mary nor Tom Batten noticed that other people were observing them, some with amusement, others with a faint disapproval of such autumnal folly. The doctor and his wife said nothing. They were not likely to, for the elder brother's affection was unassailable. All he wanted to do was to protect Tom, and he was too indulgent to intervene before the events caused by the ex-soldier's uncertain temperament. He was a refuge rather than a guide.

As the affair developed, every day making it more tangible, more accepted as something almost normal and inevitable, so the lovers relinquished all subterfuge. They went about openly, arm in arm, proud of their condition. Both thrived, growing younger every day, and at night, luxuriating in the rewards of the flesh. Both were skilful enough to translate those delights into food for mind and spirit. Their happiness knew no bounds. It consumed the barriers of remorse and doubt. They made a virtue of irresponsibility.

One morning, however, Tom appeared to be uneasy. They had taken advantage of a burst of premature spring sunshine, a glow of warmth in January following the gales, to go out to St. Germain-en-Laye, the suburb where Dumas the Elder had built his fantastic country mansion. The warmth brought out colour in the woods, swelling twigs and saturating the air with promissory smells of earth, flowers and fruits. Tom and Mary, urged by their happiness, translated these sensuous moments into hopes, and they dared to talk about the future. The reticence
with which Tom had set out from the hotel was dropped, and he courted Mary with a boyish ardour that melted her bones. They clung together, standing on the great terrace and looking out over the landscape, with the distant view of Paris. They were speechless, because they were one.

Behind them the trees sighed gently, and a robin here and there maintained a wistful thread of song. An occasional disturbance from a flock of chaffinches, a rushing of wings and a chatter of eagerness, brought only a touch of Cytherean pageantry to the scene.

“You make me feel as though I don't care what happens,” said Tom at last, releasing Mary in order to look at her. She smiled at him, and touched the side of his neck with her ungloved hand. “Things have been gathering round lately, my dear. You must guess that I've made rather a mess of my life. I've explained that. You know the worst about me, at any rate.”

“And the best, my darling,” she said. “All that is over now. Why can't we go on together, making another start? I am content, if you cannot free yourself. You know what I mean, Tom. Your wife is likely to be obstinate, is she not? Will she possibly release you? What would it mean to her?”

He was not cheered by this reminder of grim facts. He stared into the distance before replying.

“She went over to Rome after leaving me. It was probably to ensure that she should not weaken, and let me go at some future time. She is a tenacious woman, Mary. At the moment there is trouble about the settlement, the income which she has been drawing from me since I left the army after the war. She believed that I was letting the side down by going out into the business world, and she said so. But that has not prevented her from taking a third of the income which I've contrived to make by one way and another ever since I became a civilian.”

He spoke without bitterness. His attitude was that of a seaman talking about the weather and the moods of the ocean. Mary felt herself growing hot with anger. But she must not show it.

“How long is it?” she said.

“Just ten years now. As soon as I got around after coming out of hospital, I found there was nothing doing, no future in the Service for a crock, a peace-time crock.”

“Absurd, Tom. You look like a young subaltern,” she laughed, and turned him to her, pulling at his coat and drawing his face down to hers, “and you behave like one,” she said, the words whispered close to his ear, warming it with the delicious lie.

That interrupted the conversation for some moments, while they soared above the earth. A rook settled on the
pavé
near-by, and examined them with a legal eye, flapping his coat-tails.

“I don't know, Mary; but you give me courage once more. Life looks different these days, I can tell you.”

“So it should, Tom. All this pretence about growing old! I
refuse
to grow old. I'm looking to the future. Why not? We interfere with nobody. Your wife can't be allowed to behave like a bitch in the manger. Oh, dear, what have I said?” She blushed, and a trickle of laughter, falsely contrite, set Tom chuckling too. They moved away, with no further planning done for that rose-tinted future. Every time it was inspected, this trick of shying away from it inevitably followed.

The warmth, and the lull in the wind, brought rain. It drove them to the Square, and into a restaurant already nearly full of local workers. They had to share a table with two men, clerks or travellers, anonymous and morose, absorbed in their newspapers, who ignored the English couple, after an appraising flicker of the eye over Mary's figure and clothes.

Tom's early uneasiness returned. Mary saw him frown, stare at the two Frenchmen with hostility.

“Don't disapprove,” she murmured across the table. “We're not the only people in the world.”

“No, I suppose not,” he said, doubtfully. They examined the menu, a formidable manuscript, badly hectographed. But the food was not badly cooked, or the carafe of red wine clumsily decanted. Tom cheered up a little, but when the coffee came, and the Frenchmen still sat at the table, one drinking a cognac and the other ordering more coffee, he scowled at them so ferociously that one looked up, startled, and shifted his chair a fraction of an inch, before shaking out his paper to hide the threat.

“Look here, my dear,” said Tom at last. He leaned across. “I'm in a devil of a mess. I've run out of funds.”

His mouth worked convulsively after this statement. The open boyishness of the admission made Mary want to laugh, ruffle his hair, draw his head down to her lips. The absurdity of it! But she tried to share the gravity of the situation.

“Never mind, darling,” she whispered, leaning out from the table as though to waft her suggestion by an outflanking movement. “I've got plenty after that business with the banks when we bought the outfit for Joan. Don't be silly and old-fashioned about things. Everything is unusual to-day. I've contributed hardly anything, so far, to … to …” She hesitated, not knowing what to call the experiences of the past two weeks.

Tom Batten stared heavily at her. His embarrassment was sincere enough, but the fact that he knew he was going to accept her suggestion made him sullen, furtive. He was not really willing to do the unconventional thing.

“Come, darling,” she coaxed. Meanwhile, she had secretly dived into her handbag and fumbled there, glancing guiltily at one and the other of the Frenchmen,
neither of whom was in the least interested, or saw anything amiss.

She tried to crumple up a hundred-franc note in her fist, and to pass it low down alongside the table, but dropped it. Both she and Tom simultaneously put a foot to cover it, and Tom's muddy shoe came down on hers. She flinched, and tried to contain the laughter that she feared might offend him.

He put down his hand, found the note, and also her ankle. She felt his fingers touch it, fondle it. At the same time, she saw a tiny vein in his forehead pulse heavily. She read into that sign all that she wanted to read.

“Is the rain over?” she said, after the bill had been paid. “Do we go home?”

“Home?” he said, putting her coat around her, “that sounds good, Mary. Home! Do you want to, really? Do you want it, for the rest of our lives?”

“I'm ready,” she said. The two Frenchmen were aware of a glance of defiance from a pair of lovely eyes. They looked at each other, nodded, and returned to their papers as the English couple left the restaurant.

“Look, darling,” said Mary, as they walked to the station. “While things are as they are, I must be allowed …”

“It's not easy,” said Tom, still morose and ruffled by the incident.

She clung closer to him, leaning forward and looking up into his face as they walked.

“No, my love, but it's practical. We
must
be practical. It's only for the present. All this trouble will blow over, and I'm sure you will come out on top.”

“On top of what?” he asked.

“Oh, you're impossible!” she cried, but with such affection that he could not resent her words. “All this masculinity! Do be realistic, Tom!”

He looked up, somewhat more hopeful.

“Yes, things may be brighter, if this business in London gets cleared up without my being in the mess too. Though I ought to take my share, I suppose. But there is this other prospect, Mary. You see, the American, this fellow Sturm, rather a decent sort in fact; soft-hearted, but a good business man; he is proposing to pay me a commission on his commission, if I can persuade my brother Luke to let him arrange a series of concerts for young Adrian in America. I should go with him as manager, too, and take a salary that way. Sturm is convinced that the boy is a genius of rare quality, with tremendous prospects.”

Mary said nothing for a while. She walked on thoughtfully. Then her hand tightened on Tom's, as though she had come to a resolution.

“I see,” she said. “Why not? It is wonderful. Your brother is likely to be persuaded, I suppose?”

Tom looked down doubtfully.

“That's the difficulty. He too is as unaccountable as the boy. Maybe that's where young Adrian gets it from. Certainly his mother is normal enough, and sees no harm in anybody.”

“No, nor do I,” said Mary. “Why hide the child's talent? They ought to make the most of it.”

Although Joan did not write to her mother, she could not dismiss her from her thoughts. Indeed, the reason, if it was a reason, for not writing was that her obsession was too large and too violent to be surmounted. Her mother was hidden by it. The years of so intimate a relationship were cancelled, with all their simplicity, their charm, their love. Joan suffered accordingly.

Her suffering made her angry, because it had forced her back to this compromise with John. All the struggle, the break away, the ensuing resolution to make an end of an unsatisfactory marriage, would have to be gone through again before she could release herself. Meanwhile, the only thing to do was to remain as civilised as possible, while she thought out what the future would be.