The Last September (12 page)

As more and more people dropped in and the chairs gave out, the subalterns pulled the cushions on to the floor and sat on them.
Mrs. Fogarty was delighted.
The room warmed up, there was just enough air left not to make one aware of discomfort in breathing. There was a smell of wallpaper, tea and tea-cakes, polished Sam Brownes, of the
Nuit d’Amour
on Mrs. Vermont’s handkerchief which she pulled out frequently to wipe the honey from her fingers. They all felt very easy and very Irish—the qualities radiated, perhaps, from Mrs. Fogarty, who sat flushed with pleasure and hospitality taking up rather more than half of her own sofa. She wore a brown lace blouse and a tweed skirt, with a green shell rope that swung and clinked on the tea-pot. Indeed it was all very harmonious; she did not know how she would have lived at all without the military at Clonmore.

After tea, cigarettes went round, there was a kick and splutter of patent lighters. Livvy said she would not smoke, she would not indeed; they might laugh but she was an old-fashioned girl. Her continued protests attracted a good deal of attention, till she noticed that old-fashioned girls were after all in the majority. The rector’s daughters and Doreen Hartigan all sat looking approving and rather unfinished about the mouth. So she accepted a strong cigarette of Captain Carmichael’s, and Smith broke into a howl and said she had sacrificed his ideal of womanhood. Mrs. Fogarty suggested music: they helped her move the bowls and photographs off the grand piano which, undraped and opened, gave out to Mrs. Vermont’s fingers some damp chords. It was too bad, declared Mrs. Fogarty, listening doubtfully, that their tuner had died in Cork and she hadn’t the heart to look for another since. She said they must have real music, not just the piano. Real talent was present, she added, and looked round compellingly. There was a scuffle from which Mr. Smith was forced up. He stood with his weight on one leg, stroking his hair detachedly, while Mrs. Vermont looked through the music.

Mrs. Vermont remarked, in passing, to Captain Carmichael that this was a country where the most extraordinary people died. “Well, I mean,” she said, “who would have expected that of a piano-tuner? There was a house where I went for tennis; they had had a parlour-maid there who died. And last week I went for some little cakes to Fitzgerald’s and they were all plain ones. I asked for some fancies and they said the woman who did the icing had been taken, God rest her soul! Really, there’s something grizzly about that cake shop.”

“In the midst of life we are in death, if you know what I mean,” said Captain Carmichael.

Mr. Smith said he didn’t mind what he did sing: they all wanted “The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God.” The piece was very tragic and sinister, they all sat wrapt and Livvy did not notice that Mr. Armstrong was pressing her arm till she felt Doreen Hartigan notice. Then she moved away from him, closer to Lois.

There’s a brrroken-hearted woman tends the grave

of Mad Carew

And the Yellow God sits smiling up above.

Lois blushed and let Livvy squeeze her hand. They both wondered “How would
feel under the Circumstances?”
The subalterns round all looked dogged, clasping their knees, and thought of what one would do for a woman.
There was a stagger of emotional clapping. Then Mrs. Vermont cried they were too ridiculous, the boys were sillies, she couldn’t sing at all really, but if she must
she would.
So
she sang
“Melisande,”
which sent every girl there into a trance of self-pity; it was so clearly written about oneself.

With your eyes for fear 
and your mouth for love

And your youth for Pity’s grace

  —All alone, Mel-lisande, all alone.

The subalterns thought it pretty, high class but rather dull, and clapped with abandon when it was over. They cast up David Armstrong, blushing and looking very much surprised at himself and all of them.

He blushed till half way through “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” when he became carried away and carried his audience with him.

A woman came between us

She was beautiful as Venus,

brought a momentary return to consciousness. He looked at the ceiling to avoid seeing Livvy and Lois. The atmosphere strained with cramp, there was a creak of leather as subalterns readjusted their attitudes. Mrs. Fogarty sent round a plate of chocolate biscuits. What a pity it was, she said, that they did not get up some pierrots. When David returned to his place Livvy was rose-pink; she fluttered at him her remarkably long lashes.

“Indeed,” declared Mrs. Fogarty, looking from David to Smith (who had no Christian name), “I never heard anything like the two of you. No, not in Dublin in Horse Show week, nor in London nor Liverpool either. You’re remarkably gifted. Isn’t it a pity they were all so sad? Shall we all have a song now, something rousing you know, that you sang in the Great War.”

“Oh, do you know,” cried Mrs. Vermont, “I never knew Tipperary was really a place till I came to Ireland?”

“Listen to her!” shouted Mrs. Fogarty, sweeping some more of the cushions on to the floor. They were all delighted. Mrs. Vermont spread her fingers over her face. Under cover of all this excitement Lois rose and said they would have to go. She was sorry, because the party seemed slightly insulted; also, Livvy was so happy. If David should die now, she did not think Livvy would have to reproach herself. Also Captain Carmichael had seemed intrigued; he had spoken mysteriously of the adventures he had in the mountains and of the disguises he sometimes put on. She knew he must feel like the Scarlet Pimpernel and she could not help sympathising. When she rose, he said they must meet again. He and David came out to help them into their trap in the Imperial yard, tucked them up in their rugs, relinquished them disapprovingly to the exposures of the journey and stood looking after them with rain dripping down their bronzed and military noses.

They drove home very much flushed and excited. The rain came down in a curtain and hid the mountains; brown shining puddles were linked along the road. They agreed about almost everyone—especially Mrs. Vermont and the D.I.’s niece—they looked at each other over their mackintosh collars, eyes bright with sympathy, while the strong rain stung their noses, then numbed them. Only when Livvy said, “Melisande was a beautiful poem, wasn’t it?” Something stiffened in Lois: she said she thought it was sentimental.

“All that fuss, if you know what I mean, about just somebody.”

“Well, love is that, if you come to think,” said Livvy, “and myself I think it is very satisfying.” There was something so very experienced about the top of her
nose
that Lois
went flat. She felt that she herself
must be like a cake for which the flour had been forgotten.

She complained: “I wish we were not being late just this evening. Miss Norton, you know, is arriving and I did so want to look nice. My nose will not have thawed till half through dinner.”

“Oh, who is she? Is she pretty? How old is she? Is she engaged?”

“Never met her—though she often seems to have cqme to Danielstown. But I feel she may be a person one wants to look pretty at. She annoys Aunt Myra by being unfortunate in ways that are far more trying for other people than for herself. When she was little she came over to Danielstown to a children’s party: she fell down at once on the scraper and cut her knee and there was a good deal of fuss and bloodiness. And another time there were people to tea she started an argument about Kimberley, and they all stayed till past eight o’clock in the library taking down the
Encyclopedia Britannica
while other people who were coming to dinner kept arriving. And another time she lost her engagement ring at a tennis party and they were all very much upset. She wrote afterwards to say it didn’t matter because she had broken off her engagement anyhow and the man said he didn’t want the ring, he said he wished it were at the bottom of the sea. I always thought people breaking off an engagement went all noble, but that sounds to me vindictive. Aunt Myra stayed put out … She is twenty-nine.”

“It seems to me odd,” said Livvy, “that she shouldn’t have brought anything off by this time. But I daresay,” she added, “that there has been a disappointment.”

At this point they heard a lorry coming. Black and Tans, fortified inwardly against the weather, were shouting and singing and now and then firing shots. The voices, kept low by the rain, the grind of wheels on the rocky road tunnelled along through the close air with a particular horror. To meet in this narrow way would be worse than a dream; before the half-observed lorry appeared Livvy had turned the pony hurriedly up a boreen. They went up some way and waited under a dripping thorn-bush: if Black and Tans saw one hiding they were sarcastic. They heard the lorry grind past the mouth of the boreen with apprehension, feeling exposed and hunted. Lois recalled with surprise that she had cried for a whole afternoon before the War because she was not someone in a historical novel: it had begun, she thought, because they told her to go and practise. The road clear again, they found that they could not turn the trap; they had to back the pony out. “My!” said Livvy, glaring at the horizon. “I wish I were driving a lorry! I should like to crash those fellows head on!”

Just before eight, Livvy dropped Lois at Danielstown gates and drove off, beating her pony into a gallop. Her father would kill her, certainly! Lois raced up the avenue till she had no breath, then had to crawl the rest of the way, recovering. Apprehensive, she strained for the throb of the dinner-gong, a shriek of reproach from a window. But her unpunctuality passed unnoticed: Miss Norton herself had only just arrived. The hall was full of suitcases, a fur coat sprawled on a chair, there was a tennis racquet, a bag of golf-clubs.

“Though where the poor female is going to play golf … !” thought Lois. “A nice coat! … Good, she has brought the
Tatler!”

No one had even gone up to dress, from the library voices exclaimed in excitement; voices complained insistently through the drawing-room door. Lois undid the top buttons of her mackintosh and stepped out of it, leaving a damp ring. Absently she wrung the water out of her hat. She listened.

“She is certain she has left it in the train,” her aunt was saying, “she says she would swear it was put in with her at Kingsbridge and that she saw it after leaving Darramore. I do not believe myself in travelling with suitcases, one is always counting—I believe in one good trunk.”

“Looking at it from the porters’ point of view—” said Mrs. Montmorency.

The library door clicked open and Laurence, looking quite enthusiastic, shot into the hall. “She thinks telephoning will do it,” he said to Lois. “I cannot make her understand about the Ballyhinch telephone.” He disappeared, shouting, into the back part of the house. Evidently there need be no hurry for anything. Lois sat on the hall table to look at the
Tatler.
Early autumn fashions reminded her—this was an opportunity to try on the fur coat. She hoped for the proper agony, finding a coat she wanted … Her arms slipped silkily through; her hands appeared, almost tiny, out of the huge cuffs. “Oh, the escape!” she thought, pressing her chin down, fading, dying into the rich heaviness. “Oh, the
escape
in other people’s clothes!” And she paced round the hall with new movements: a dark, rare, rather wistful woman, elusive with jasmine. “No?” she said on an upward note: the voice startled her, experience was behind it. She touched the fur lightly, touched the edge of a cabinet—her finger-tips drummed with a foreign sensitiveness. And the blurred panes, the steaming changing trees, the lonely cave of the hall no longer had her consciousness in a clamp. How she could live! she felt. She would not need anyone, she would be like an orchestra playing all to itself. “Is it mink?” she wondered.

“You look so nice,” said Miss Norton, from the door of the library.

Lois went quite blank. “Oh,” she replied.

“Where is that unfortunate Lady Naylor?”

“I can’t
think
— Well, she is in the drawing-room.”

“Anyhow,” said Miss Norton, “I will go up now.

When she sees me looking less arrived she may forget about the suitcase.” She looked at Lois earnestly. “I don’t lose things except coming here; I am efficient really. But there seems a kind of fatality… .”

“
I
know.
”

“Do you?” she said with interest, a keen disconcerting flash— “How odd that you should!”

An approach seemed possible, imminent. Lois, feeling herself smiled at, came out of the coat without embarrassment. Miss Norton, who did not seem surprised by the disappearance of the family, asked to be shown where she was. They went upstairs together; she was on the top floor, opposite Laurence.

“Who was the capable person? Who wouldn’t let me telephone—the young man?”

“Laurence.”

“Oh, Laurence. And the other people: I couldn’t hear their names. They seemed very much here—-faintly resentful: I expect I must be horrible for them. He at once accused me of having cut my knee on a scraper—when I was three or four. Who did you say?”

“The Montmorencys.”

“Oh, Hugo and Francie? Of course I have heard of them. Isn’t she his mother—practically?” Miss Norton took off her hat and looked at herself in the glass dispassionately and closely. “God!” she remarked.