The Last September (17 page)

Laurence tapped and remarked through the door that his Aunt Myra wanted to know if the letters were ready. Timothy would be starting now; he could wait five minutes but if he did would almost certainly miss the post.

“Damn,” said Marda.

“What d’you say?”

“Oh, come in. Why did I polish my nails?”

Laurence sat down on the window-seat. He was annoyed and surprised to find Lois present. He suspected that she had been bothering Marda, confiding, fidgeting, asking about love and wishing to try on her hats. Probably she had brought up a poetry book and kept coming across with a thumb on the margin to point out the bits she loved. He wished that Lois would marry and leave Danielstown, he could perfectly see her as a very pink bride, later as a girl wife in the Chekhov tradition, in a pink blouse, sucking sweets audibly, prattling of girl friends’ lovers, rustling papers endlessly. He only hoped that she might marry Gerald, who had no papers to rustle.

“I hope,” he said, “that Lois has been amusing you?”

“Don’t talk,” said Lois. “I mean, she wants to finish her letter.”

“Evidently,” said Laurence.

“Explain Leslie,” said Marda, writing rapidly. “It will help at dinner.”

“She is engaged,” said Lois, “to a Mr. Lawe. That is his photograph there. His name is Leslie.”

“Oh yes,” said Laurence.

“He is not comic,” said Marda, leaning around and pushing the letter away. “She makes him sound so—like ‘a Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman.’ Lady Naylor will like it all, but I haven’t told her. Will you help Mr. Montmorency and Lois form a public opinion and not be surprised when I talk about him at dinner? About the end of the fish, I thought— I cannot finish this letter, it will have to go tomorrow and I will wire.”

“And I have a piece of news for you. Castle Trent was raided for arms last night. Of course they didn’t find any. They think the thing was entirely amateur, nothing to do with the I.R.A. at all. They took away some boots. The Trents think one of the raiders was a gardener’s cousin from Ballydarra who hates the family. He left a quite unnecessary message behind with a skull and crossbones. He sounds to me rather a silly man. I am hoping perhaps they will come here tonight. We have two assegais and a stiletto that Uncle Richard uses for a paper knife.”

“It is a paper knife,” said Lois, “only made so as to look like a stiletto. How perfectly thrilling; do let us all sit up.”

“I shall sit up, but you had better go to bed. You might be insulted.”

“Really, I am not so female as all that.”

Laurence shrugged his shoulders.

“At any rate, don’t tell the others. Uncle Richard’ll get fussy and spoil it, and if Aunt Myra meets them she will keep them talking all night.”

“It seems so odd,” said Laurence, “that she should be my blood aunt and not yours.”

Marda looked at him thoughtfully over the back of her chair. She had not realised he could be so disagreeable. If he did not take care, he would grow up just like Mr. Montmorency. She told him so, and added that she was surprised he did not appreciate Lois. “She is very charming,” she said, “and very intelligent. Think of all the cousins you might have had. It’s not her fault that you’re not in Tahiti or Valladolid or wherever it was you wanted to go this summer. If I were not going to marry I should ask her to come abroad with me. I have never been less bored.”

“It would be marvellous,” said Lois. Now that Laurence had come in she felt more alone with Marda, and nearer; she could think of all the things she had wanted to say. Intoxicated by being told she was charming and by Laurence’s disapproval, she hitched herself up on to the end of the wooden bed, where she sat swinging her legs and smiling, all girlhood. She felt movement, a wind in her face as though she were on the prow of a ship. With a bound, life carried her forward again. She felt certain that Leslie would die or break off the engagement. “Marvellous,” she repeated.

“At any rate,” Laurence said, “you can ask her to be a bridesmaid.” And there was Lois, forlorn in the aisle with hot air coming up her legs from a grating and tears dripping off her nose into a bunch of chrysanthemums. She would keep the ribbon from her bouquet and show it to Gerald in confidence while she unpacked on their wedding night.

“I am thinking of going abroad quite soon,” she said to Laurence.

“Mr. Montmorency has gone for a walk,” said Laurence. “He had to take an umbrella. Apparently he does not usually take an umbrella, but when he was half-way down the avenue Mrs. Montmorency suddenly said he must, because it had never rained like this before. So she took an umbrella and one for herself and started off down the avenue after him. Aunt Myra said she should not have done this because of her heart and looked round for me, but I had gone quickly into the dining-room which is the last place anybody would look for one between meals. So she found Uncle Richard and he took another umbrella and ran quickly down the avenue after Mrs. Montmorency, telling her not to run like that. When he had caught her up he took the umbrella from her and went still more quickly, shouting, after Mr. Montmorency who pretended not to hear and walked on with a back view of positive hatred.”

“But how do you know all this if you were in the dining-room?”

“When they were under way I went to the library window and looked after them … Lois, did Lesworth tell you he has captured Peter Connor? He was in bed, apparently.”

“Laurence!” called Lady Naylor from the end of the gallery. “Where are you? What about Marda’s letters? … They can’t go now,” she went on, approaching. “Timothy waited ten minutes, and now he has got to run all the way but he will certainly miss the post … Oh, you are all here?”

She looked at her nephew and niece disparagingly and sat down on the bed. “It is an extraordinary thing,” she said generally, “the way nobody in this house can be trusted to remember messages … It has been a tiring day,” she added. “Nobody could be nicer than that young Mr. Lesworth, but certainly he is not intelligent. And since then they have all been running down the avenue with umbrellas. And oh, what do you think? They have been raided for arms at Castle Trent. They think the whole thing must have been organised by their gardener’s cousin. They took some boots away.”

WHEN 
they had all gone to bed, lamps downstairs extinguished, doors upstairs shut with a rattle upon the last voices, Francie talked of Marda’s engagement and said she was glad. She was glad as a wife that the net should be flung wider. She talked, but Hugo did not answer, he was still too angry about the umbrella to speak when they were alone. So till well on into the night they lay beside each other under the darkness in an intent and angry silence. Then she wept and said they should never have come back to Danielstown.

“It’s as though I couldn’t remember where anything was.”

“Look here, if you can’t sleep you’d better take something.”

“Hugo!”

“I suppose this place disagrees with you, too.”

He had designed an insult, he could not bear her to intrude upon his wakefulness. Whichever way he turned in that mournful freedom—and the perspectives of his regret opened fanwise, profound avenues, each white at the end with a faceless statue—she would come stumbling after him, hand to heart. “Try and sleep,” he said, and sent her away angrily.

She feigned sleep rigidly, hardly bearing to lie there. Her mind clenched tight, like a fist, at the isolation of this proximity. She longed to resume the life of day downstairs in the empty rooms. She had lain awake in the South of France hearing palm trees creak in the gritty and dry wind, hooked-back shutters rattle against the wall; she had lain awake in town with her room a battle of lights through the thin blinds, lights like her thoughts flashing and crossing— But across this battle-piece, under the long lances, had swarmed, like Uccello’s roses, small comforts, a kind of content at suffering, the tenderness of imagined contact. She had wept because he was not with her. Now a nostalgia for that solitude, for a wall so patient and smooth to the reaching hand where there was now a sleeper, came on her, quenching tears. He thought she slept.

But, “I remember,” she said, about two o’clock, “a Miss Lawe. I met her last in a tram in Dublin. I remember then she was talking of a nephew—I wonder would that be Leslie?”

“Did she say his name?”

“I can’t remember: I got out of the tram … Hugo, I’m so thirsty.”

Sighing, he got out of bed.

Laurence could not sleep either. There must have been something at dinner … He longed for the raiders and strained his ears in the silence—which had, like the darkness, a sticky and stifling texture, like cobwebs, muffling the senses. The rain had passed, the trees had shed the weight of it, never a drop came through them or tapped on his window-sill. Once he heard, he thought, a fleet of bicycles in the avenue; he sat up propped on his palms, assembling his attitude, and was prepared to go down and admit the party courteously. He meant to offer them bread and apples and leisurely conversation—and jam and whisky, but in relating the incident he would only mention the bread and apples, he liked that smack of austerity, an Oriental graveness. But there were no bicycles; no one knocked; all he had to say went sour in him. It was only some cattle come up close to the house, rubbing against the wires. They moved away.

He lit a candle, blinked at the startled flame and blew it out again. Darkness resumed, with an uncomfortable suggestion of normality. There seemed proof that the accident of day, of action, need not recur. And from this blank full stop, this confrontation of a positive futurelessness, his mind ran spiderlike back on the thread spun out of itself for advance, stumbling and swerving a little over its own intricacy. He caught trains he had missed, rushing out to the boundless possible through the shining mouths of termini, re-ordered meals in a cosmopolitan blur, re-ate them, thought of thought but sheered away from that windy gulf full of a fateful clapping of empty book-covers. Far enough back, in a kind of unborn freedom, he even remade marriages. Laura Naylor gave Hugo, scoffingly, bridal tenderness; they had four sons and all hurried out to coarsen in Canada. Here, in this that had been her room, Laura had lain on her wedding morning, watching a spider run up to the canopy of the bed, while Hugo made ready, five miles off, to be driven over to take her hand at the altar by poor John Trent, and the four young sons in excitement jiggled among the cherubim. And it was Richard who married Francie, who came to him all in a bloom at his first request and made a kind of a basinette of a life for him, dim with lace. Aunt Myra enjoyed a vigorous celibacy, while Laurence, to be acclaimed a second Weiniger, blew out his brains at—say—Avila, in a fit of temporary discouragement without having heard of Danielstown. Lois, naturally, was not born at all.

But this involved a certain rearrangement of Laurence’s character, for not for anything would he have put a pistol into his mouth, though he would have liked to fire a gun out of a window. This neglect of the raiders’ pricked his egotism. And alarmed by the dragging tick of the watch at his pillow, slowing down as at the mortal sickness of Time, he turned over and thought in a fury, he could not think why Laura should have married Mr. Farquar. The rudest man in Ulster he was, with a disagreeably fresh complexion and an eye like a horse. Her confusion had clotted up in the air of the room and seemed, in that closest darkness under the ceiling, to be still impending. Here, choked in the sweep of the bed curtains, she had writhed in those epic rages; against Hugo, against Richard, against any prospect in life at all; biting the fat resistant pillows until once she had risen, fluttered at her reflection, dabbed at her eyes, buttoned a tight sleek dress of that day’s elegance over her heaving bosom, packed her dresses in arched trunks (that had come back since to rot in the attics) and driven off, averting from the stare of the house an angry profile. Hotly, she went up north to attract and marry Mr. Farquar. It was in her to have done otherwise, but there is a narrow and fixed compulsion, Laurence recognised, inside the widest ranges of our instability.

Below, through the floor, a light drawling scrape climbed into stuttering melody; syncopated dance music, ghostly with the wagging of hips and horrid in darkness Lois, child of that unwise marriage, was playing the gramophone. Laurence listened, paralysed with indignation, then reached out and banged a chair on the floor. She attended; the music broke off with a shock, there was a tingling calm as after an amputation. He above, she below, they thought of each other with outrage.

Certainly, thought Laurence, there must have been something at dinner.

But Sir Richard and Lady Naylor were soundly asleep. She was dreaming about the Aberdeens, while he rode round the country on a motor bicycle from which he could not detach himself. His friends cut him; he discovered he was a Black and Tan. But night rolled on over them thickly and uneventfully. The others exhausted themselves to sleep. The darkness clamped round their waking brains did not any one moment seem to abate its insane pressure; only, within an hour of breakfast they found themselves restored without reason to that illusion of daylight. With a kind of fatedness, a passivity, they resumed the operation of living.

The morning gave birth to a disappointment. Livvy arrived just as Lois was starting out for the village with Marda to send the telegram. Her horse was lame so she came over on a bicycle, and certainly, thought Lois, watching her lean the bicycle into a privet hedge, there were many things about Livvy that were a pity. For Marda stood at the top of the steps in a green jumper, fanning the telegraph form on the air to dry the ink. The green, queer and metallic, cut surprisingly into the steaming tones of the house and the morning. She would be gone in three days. And now while Livvy settled her hat and her front and prepared for speech, Marda smiling came down the steps and walked away down the avenue, not caring. She missed nobody. The dogs went with her: gloomily Lois’s eyes went after their wagging sterns.