The Last September (16 page)

“My dear, why?”

“What lovely brushes! What a … what an uncommon photograph frame!”

“Yes, that’s Leslie Lawe.”

“Oh? Oh yes,” Lois paused uncertainly. “How good-looking! Do, do you know him well?”

“Very. We’re engaged.”

“Oh, how lovely!” Lois had a shock of flatness.

“Oh yes. Didn’t you know?”

“Well, I thought you probably would be. Shall you live in London?”

“I suppose we shall; I suppose we shall have to.”

“Oh, how lovely!”

Marda laughed and began screwing on the lids of her little pots. In the light of her brilliant life, her deftness seemed to Lois inimitable. One would have had to have lived twenty-nine years as fast, as surely and wildly, to screw pink celluloid caps on to small white pots with just that lightness of finger-tip, just that degree of amusement, just that detachment in smile and absorption in attitude. And the pink smell of nail-varnish, dresses trickling over a chair, flash of swinging shoe-buckle, cloud of powder over the glass, the very room with its level stare on the tree-tops, took on awareness, smiled with secrecy, had the polish and depth of experience. The very birds on the frieze flew round in cognizant agitation.

“What a lovely dress!” said Lois, picking up the end of a red sleeve, so that she seemed to be standing hand in hand with the dress.

“Vienna.”

“And, oh, what a lovely green one— Am I pawing things?”

“I like it. But haven’t you got some drawings?”

“Drawings? Oh, my drawings! Oh—I’m afraid they’d bore you.”

“I don’t expect so.”

“Well, I did just happen to bring them along.”

She had brought two drawing-books, cheerful in mottled bindings with tissue between the pages. She took them across to Marda, then turned away. The drawings, in black ink, illustrated the
Morte d’Arthur
and Omar Khayyam. They remembered Beardsley. Lois, away at a window, heard Marda rustle the tissue paper: she watched the rain. Beyond the trees, a farm cart rattled along the road. Marda, conscientious, turned back to the title page. Here she paused, for Lois had printed out, in uncertain Gothic:

I am a painter Who cannot paint;
In my life, a devil rather than saint;
In my brain, as poor a creature too:
No end to all that I cannot do!
But do one thing at least I can— 
Love a man or hate a man,

Supremely—

Lois Honoria Farquar: 
Her Book.

“Oh,” said Marda.

“Browning.”

“But can you really?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“And are you sure that you can’t paint? Have you ever tried?”

“I hated two of the girls at school and I really rather do hate Mr. Montmorency. And I can’t help getting involved with people. Personal relations make a perfect havoc of me; my headmistress said so. Of course I haven’t had much scope here, so far. Being grown up seems trivial, somehow. I mean, dressing and writing notes instead of letters, and trying to make impressions. When you have to think so much of what other people feel about you there seems no time to think what you feel about them. Everybody is genial at one in a monotonous kind of way. I don’t seem to find young men inspiring, somehow. I suppose I shall. Did you ever have any difficulty about beginning?”

“I can’t remember. I never can see back to the other side of things that have happened.”

“I think I must cut that title page out. I wrote it when I was rather young. But surely love wouldn’t get so much talked about if there were not something in it? I mean, even soap, you know, however much they advertise … I mean.”

“Oh, there must be. Let me look at the drawings.”

Marda, still on the table with crossed legs, spread out the book briskly. But Lois, all in a glow, could not help remarking: “Someone told me I was neurotic.”

“I shouldn’t worry.”

With a brutality of which she was unaware Marda returned to the drawings. Lois, thinking “I do not interest her,” sat down on the floor with her back to the chest of drawers. Over the mottled carpet curled strange pink fronds: someone dead now, buying the carpet, had responded to an idea of beauty. Lois thought how in Marda’s bedroom, when she was married, there might be a dark blue carpet with a bloom on it like a grape, and how this room, this hour would be forgotten. Already the room seemed full of the dusk of oblivion. And she hoped that instead of bleaching to dust in summers of empty sunshine, the carpet would burn with the house in a scarlet night to make one flaming call upon Marda’s memory. Lois again realized that no one had come for her, after all. She thought: “I must marry Gerald.”

But with a jump of the heart she heard every page turn over. She received the print of each book as though her sensibility were the paper. Reactions to Lois’s drawings were as a rule momentary and staccato: “My dear! … They’re sinister … what a marvellous muezzin! … Aren’t those the seven queens?” And indeed it had come to seem to herself that the drawings must really mean something. A glance at them, though she had lost the power to see them, gave her the kind of surprised assurance one might expect from motherhood.

Marda said nothing; once or twice she changed her attitude, shifting the book from knee to knee. Soot, dislodged by the rain, sifted sharply on to the paper fan in the grate, startling them to an exchange of glances. Then she said deliberately, closing the drawing-book:

“I think you’re cleverer than you can draw, you know.” “Oh—”

“You don’t mind, do you? Look—have another cigarette. Why can’t you write, or something?”

“That’s so embarrassing. Even things like—like elephants get so personal.”

“I know. I give up reading—I’m sick of their personal elephants … Or act? But why do you stay here?”

“I can’t think,” said Lois, startled.

“You like to be the pleasant young person?”

“I like to be in a pattern.” She traced a pink frond with her finger. “I like to be related; to have to be what I am. Just to
be
is so intransitive, so lonely.”

“Then you will like to be a wife and mother.” Marda got off the writing-table and began to change her stockings. “Jacob’s ladder,” she explained. “It’s a good thing we can always be women.”

“I hate women. But I can’t think how to begin to be anything else.”

“Climate.”

“But I wouldn’t like to be a man. So much fuss about doing things. Except Laurence—but he is such a hog. Ought I to go to London?”

“Ever been abroad?”

Of course she had not, she said, because of the War, and of course she would like to. There was Rome, and she would like to stay in a hotel by herself. There was just “abroad”: she always wondered how long the feeling lasted. And there was America, but one would have to have introductions or one would get a crick in one’s neck from just always looking up at things. She would like to feel real in London. She had never come out through a pass and looked down on little distinct white cities with no smoke. She had never been in a tunnel of more than five minutes—she had heard there were tunnels in which you could nearly suffocate. She had never seen anything larger than she could imagine. She wanted, she said, to see backgrounds without bits taken out of them by Holy Families; small black trees running up and down white hills. She thought the little things would be important, trees with electric lights growing out of them, she had heard of; coloured syphons. She wanted to go wherever the War hadn’t. She wanted to go somewhere nonchalant where politics bored them, where bands played out of doors in the hot nights and nobody wished to sleep. She wanted to go into cathedrals unadmonished and look up unprepared into the watery deep strangeness. There must be perfect towns where shadows were strong like buildings, towns secret without coldness, unaware without indifference. She liked mountains, but did not care for views. She did not want adventures but she would like just once to be nearly killed. She wanted to see something that only she would remember. Could one really float a stone in a glacier stream? She liked unmarried sorts of places. She did not want to see the Taj Mahal or the Eiffel Tower (could one avoid it?) or to go to Switzerland or Berlin or any of the Colonies. She would like to know people and go to dinner parties on terraces, and she thought it would be a pity to miss love. Could one travel alone? She did not mind being noticed because she was a female, she was tired of being not noticed because she was a lady. She could not imagine ever not wanting someone to talk to about tea-time. If she went to Cook’s, could they look out all the trains for her, in Spain and everywhere? She had never been to Cook’s. Was there any law about selling tickets to people under age?

Marda, smoothing the last wrinkle out of a stocking and fastening up a suspender, said she did not believe this was so.

“Of course anybody could do all that. But it would not be me.”

“But be interested in what happens to you for its own sake; don’t expect to be touched or changed—or to be in anything that you do. One just watches. Pain is one’s misunderstanding.”

The advice, fruit of her own relations to experience, unwisdom, lacking the sublimer banality, was—as she suspected while still speaking—to her young friend meaningless and without value. The infinite variance of that relation breaks the span of comprehension between being and being and makes an attempt at sympathy the merest fumbling for outlet along the boundaries of the personal. Lois looked vaguely out at the sky and thought how she could not possibly travel in Europe with a green canvas trunk with her school initials. She longed for three leather suitcases. She said sadly:

“The thought of places without one is so lonely.”

“Pull yourself together, my dear child.”

“Don’t you think honeymoons are great waste of travelling?”

“That reminds—I must write a letter. Don’t go— look: have another cigarette. What is the date?”

“I don’t know. Does it matter?”

Evidently it did matter; Marda had to unpack the bottom of a suitcase and look the date up in a pocket-book. And from this Lois immediately concluded Leslie must be one of those keen square people who did not care for girls of nineteen, whose eyes slid past one’s look impatiently, who had no enthusiasms and who read the biographies of politicians other than Disraeli.

She heard Marda writing with little pauses and gushes, her shoulders and the stoop of her head took on an appearance of obligation. Lois thought how anxious to marry Marda must really be, how anxious not to frighten Leslie away from her, and how all her distant-ness and her quick, rejecting air must be a false effect, accidental and transitory.

“I think,” she said, “I must be a woman’s woman.”

“Oh, yes. Where are we going to tennis tomorrow?”

“Castle Trent—but we won’t because of the rain. Is Mr. Lawe very social?”

“Reasonably. Of course, he likes his people nice.
What
was the name of the man at lunch—surname?”

“Lesworth. Gerald is very social. He smiles all the time like a dog. Do you think that is good in a man?”

“I am telling Leslie he wants to marry you—may
I?”

“Will it give Mr. Lawe a good impression?”

“Well, it furnishes you rather. And I can’t think what else to say.”

“Don’t scratch it out,” said Lois after an interval, “but as a matter of fact he didn’t speak of marriage. He merely kissed me. The English have quite a different moral standard.”

“Besides, he had been up all night.”

“What are men one is engaged to like?”

“Very worried and kind,” said Marda, blotting a sheet of her letter. “Business-like, passionate and accurate. When they press you against their chests a paper crackles, and when you sit up again to do your face and arrange your hair, they cough and pull out the paper, all folded, and say: ‘While I think of it, I just wanted to consult you about this.’ Dinner-services come crashing through the air, like in a harlequinade. You feel you have been kissed in a shop. I cannot be adequate. I suggested writing to three public schools for vacancies for our three little boys, but that was not nice, apparently. When you are engaged you live in the future, and a large part of the future is improper till it has happened.”

“Oh … what would happen now if you lost your engagement ring?” asked Lois with enjoyment.

“I daren’t wear it— Oh look here, I am talking like a fool. I’m sorry, Lois, but you really must not talk to me when I am writing letters. I need Leslie. Dinner-services don’t matter. If you never need anyone as much you will be fortunate. I don’t know for myself what is worth while. I’m sick of all this trial and error. Will you find a book or something? Don’t go.”

Lois did not wish to go, but thought, “Why should she keep me here when she is thinking about Leslie?” She felt deprived and unhappy. She tried to imagine a situation in which Leslie would look ridiculous. She prayed that the three correct little boys might never be born. She hoped he would have five daughters, and all artistic— “One thing more,” she said, “how is it that men are so seldom photographed in profile? Do they have to look frank?”

Steps coming down the gallery, relentlessly, with intention, might well have been Leslie’s but were unmistakably Laurence’s.