The Last September (19 page)

“Because if that should be what she is going to do, I should rather she did not do it with us. For one thing, the Lawes are relations, they are cousins of a cousin of mine by marriage. One does not know what they might not say about influence. Though no one could interfere less than I do, one never knows, does one, what might go round through the family? And really I am superstitious about her visits; already this time she has lost a suitcase. One cannot help feeling responsible.”

“But are you certain,” asked Mrs. Carey, looking critically round this part of her garden as though she were wishing to have it all up and replant it again, “that she is going to break it off?”

“I shouldn’t like to say. She has got into a kind of a nervous habit of sending telegrams. Up and down, up and down all day to the village. Surely that is abnormal in an engaged girl? It is not even as if they were buying a house or anything. It’s bound to be so un-intimate—unless she does not consider the postmistress, and I do think surely she ought to because it is our postmistress. And another thing—I don’t really know that I ought to speak of this, but I really cannot discuss it with poor little Francie—I don’t think she has at all a good effect on Hugo. You know what he’s like? Well, he’s quite different. Quite
empressé …
But I don’t expect there is anything in that really. One so easily says too much.”

She paused, sighed and waited. Mrs. Carey looked at her mildly. “Oh?” she said. “Oh yes. But how do you mean?”

“I know Francie notices, I know she is unhappy. Of course she always is unhappy, but she’s unhappy now in a different way. Of course one hates to say it, but one does know what Hugo
is… .”

“Oh—is he really?” said Mrs. Carey, startled.

“What Hugo needs is real trouble. Now if poor little Francie died—”

“Is she seriously—?”

“No, I feel that he will die first, he has just that way of avoiding things. Look how he didn’t marry Laura … However, I expect I am being quite ridiculous; I hate to exaggerate—it is from having Laurence so much in the house. Have you noticed how clever young men—-? I believe he’s worse in England; they think him amusing. Of course there is no harm in Marda; one has known her since she was little. She’s 
only wild—two of her uncles were like that. Shall you ever forget how her knee bled that afternoon? You know, I didn’t give another children’s party for three years!”

Coming to the edge of the lawn, they looked down on a court where Marda, Lois, Laurence and Nona Carey were playing tennis. The two ladies, at peace and with the faint self-congratulation with which one generation watches another, gazed with a statuesque remoteness over the foreground. “She is, somehow, I don’t know … charming,” said Mrs. Carey, as Marda and Lois crossed and recrossed. “Shall we go round before tea and look at the dahlias? I wanted to ask you… .”

They turned, having cast an imposing shadow over the consciousness of the players, and went softly, heavily over the grass to the iron door of the garden. It seemed natural to Mrs. Carey, half dissolved in the brightness and depth of the afternoon, that Hugo should be attracted towards a fellow visitor; such things came on and passed, transitory as a summer. She did not see that there was anything one need do; she said so to Lady Naylor.

The fine weather was back again. Over the roof of Mount Isabel a mountain sheathed in pink air looked gentle and distant. Light slid over the heavy burnished trees; the cream fagade of the house was like cardboard, high and confident in the sun—a house without weight, an appearance, less actual than the begonias’ scarlet and wax-pink flesh. Begonias, burning in an impatience of colour, crowded over the edge of heart-shaped beds. As the four came up from the court there was silence over the sheen of grass. Then a maid leaned out from the dark through the drawing-room window sounding the brass tea-gong: a minor note.

Marda perhaps was wild, like her uncles, but not inconsiderate. She had realised, almost upon arrival, that the worst thing she could do would be to attract Mr. Montmorency. To be loved by him would be the culminating disaster of her unfortunate visits. The idea seemed to her silly—she could not think of herself as fatal—but rooted itself during a fit of extreme apprehension induced by the loss of her suitcase. She dreaded the suitcase might not be the close of her record; having made the acquaintance of Hugo she saw it would not be. She might not be fatal, but
here
she was certainly fated. She thought: “Damn him!” with conscious injustice and drew on every resource, all that might once have been called the arts of her sex, to repel, to annoy and to bore him. That day of the beech walk, in old Danny’s cottage, she had had in a flash the measure of her unsuccess. Persistently charmless, untiring in her attempts not to please, she had still to retreat, resentful, upon a female wariness, guardedness, circumspection she always despised. Her reward: at the foot of stairs at bedtime a contact of finger-tips—all of himself in the touch—as he gave her her candlestick; a startled look over the flame. And as the four candles went up with the ladies, drawing a tide of shadow, she and Lois had turned at a turn of the stairs to see him still there, looking up from the staggering mountain dark. She took Lois’s arm.

That was the night he did not sleep, and Lois did not sleep either.

Today, Smith had ridden over to Mount Isabel for tea and Nona. He stood smiling over the glittering tray, in the high dark-yellow shadows, pleased but anonymous. He was a man whose name one could not remember. But his appearance agitated Mrs. Carey, 
who recalled that he did not eat any tea. She hoped it would all be all right.

She said to Marda distractedly: “I am glad you are going to be happy. I hope you will be really, really married.”

“Thank you so much,” said Marda. “I am sure I shall be.”

“Of course,” continued Mrs. Carey, still watching Smith, “I ought not to congratulate him, I ought to congratulate you.”

“I am very fortunate.”

“Oh
no,
I don’t mean that at all. Show me your lovely ring—oh, you haven’t got it on. But I expect you have got a lovely ring. Mr. Smith, I hope you will play tennis?”

But Smith, who did not feel like tennis, had not brought shoes. Tennis was not his idea at all. He had thought perhaps a little walk in the garden, a few plums … And Nona got up very pink and conscious and circulated with plates of cake. She knew that she must throw off people like Mr. Smith because next summer she was to be presented and have a season in London. Lady Naylor could not help raising her eyebrows at Mrs. Carey.

“Such a pity,” remarked Mrs. Carey, as they slid up armchairs to the tea-table, “you didn’t bring over the Montmorencys. Wouldn’t they come?”

“He
might have come,” said Laurence, “but as I am not allowed to drive there was not room in the car. There are too many of us.”

“Never mind,” said Marda. “I am going on Monday.”

“Oh no, you aren’t!” cried Lois, and. added respectfully, “Don’t be so silly.”

Lady Naylor sighed. “Unfortunately, Marda must go back to England. I don’t know what we shall do without her… .”

“Do you like England?” said Nona Carey, moving away from Smith. “Are you really going to live there? I always think it’s so new-looking. But of course there’s a great deal going on … Where do
you
live, Mr. Smith?”

“Eastbourne.”

Although Lady Naylor said at once that that must be very bracing, Smith wilted under a general commiseration. He recrossed his legs, frowned at the toe of his shoe and said he thought sometimes of going to East Africa. A forlorn and slighted feeling the announcement of Marda’s departure cast over them was heightened by this proposed defection of Smith’s. Lady Naylor remarked disparagingly that that would be rather lonely, while Mrs. Carey, seeing Smith at once against hot African skies in a silhouette of nobility, felt they had been unkind and asked him to come over here on the sofa and tell her about himself. He told her. Nona sat and twirled on the music stool.

“Smith,” said Laurence, “you ought to stay and defend us.” And Smith had to promise he would not leave the Army and go to East Africa till they were all settled.

But to Laurence and Lois this all had already a ring of the past. They both had a sense of detention, of a prologue being played out too lengthily, with unnecessary stresses, a wasteful attention to detail. Apart, but not quite unaware of each other, queerly linked by antagonism, they both sat’ eating tea with dissatisfaction, resentful at giving so much of themselves to what was to be forgotten. The day was featureless, a stock pattern day of late summer, blandly insensitive 
to their imprints. The yellow sun slanting in under the blinds on full-bosomed silver, hands balancing Worcester, dogs poking wistfully up from under the cloth, seemed old, used, filtering from the surplus of some happy fulfilment; while, unapproachably elsewhere, something went by without them.

Marda wanted more tea—but they were all distracted, an argument raged round Smith. “You must, of course, go on Monday?” said Laurence, taking her cup. “Oh yes—why?” She leaned back from the bar of sun, into the shade of the curtains. Shadow gave transparency to her colours; its brown clarity hardened her face revealingly so that she was exposed a moment, in her anxiety, without the defence of manner. Her green linen dress went ghostly against the cretonne’s rather jarring florescence.

“Just when it’s fine,” said Laurence, banal with sincerity.

“That is because I’m going.”

He listened a moment and, as the uproar of argument was sustained, said quickly, “Lois and I aren’t a good addition—the Montmorencys think so. Is that what bored you? Nobody’s ever gone so soon. There was a walk I wanted to take you.” He rattled the cup and saucer at her in desperation. “I think you make a mistake, going.”

“Oh, I expect so, but—”

“Look at Lois, her eyes are starting out of her head. When you’ve gone, she’ll go up and cry on your bed. It will fill her mornings.”

“Oh, shut up, she can hear you.”

“No,” said Laurence, “she can’t, though she’s trying to. I’m not
so
sorry, but I do think it’s unimaginative of you, going. Why have you got to see Mr. Lawe? I mean, quite dispassionately, isn’t there heaps of time for him? … You see,” concluded Laurence, “I am enraged—by all this—past snubbing point.”

“I want some more tea,” said Marda, “more than anything in the world.”

Unable to attract the attention of their hostess, Laurence leaned over the tray and took the teapot. On his way back to Marda he guessed from the unmoving intentness with which she was staring out at the begonias—they gave back little vermilion flecks to her eyes—that there was someone at the bottom of this and that it was Mr. Montmorency. He had learnt— from leaning out of his window while his aunt confided in Mrs. Montmorency down on the steps—that they all thought she contemplated breaking off her engagement. Personally, he thought this improbable. Mr. Montmorency himself was the supreme objection; but also she would be getting herself a good home and what went with it—money, assurance and scope. He himself only wished he could do so as easily. He now stood above her holding the cup of tea and could have counted three before she turned round. But then—oh, the waste of his comprehension—he saw she was laughing.

She had laughed at a thought of the subdued surprise with which they would come to her wedding; barely dressed as befitted because of that unshaken disbelief in her; buttoning, till well up the aisle, their white gloves. But the origin of their disbelief did not seem to her funny; had acquired for her, in fact, a tragic vulgarity. So that she did not explain the joke to Laurence; she thanked him and drank the tea, which was all wrong.

Out, at last, through the window, dazzled, threading and separating between the flower-beds, the party dispersed with their cigarettes. Large to themselves, to 
each other graduating from a little below life-size, to an eye from the mountain antlike—but smaller and less directed—or like beads tipped out. A sense of exposure, of being offered without resistance to some ironic uncuriosity, made Laurence look up at the mountain over the roof of the house. In some gaze—of a man’s up there hiding, watching among the clefts and ridges—they seemed held, included and to have their only being. The sense of a watcher, reserve of energy and intention, abashed Laurence, who turned from the mountain. But the unavoidable and containing stare impinged to the point of a transformation upon the social figures with orderly, knitted shadows, the well-groomed grass and the beds in their formal pattern.

Driving home, rather tightly packed hip to hip in the back of the car between Marda and Lois and bumping conjointly over the inequalities of the road, Lady Naylor told them of a discovery she had made. Mrs. Carey, also, did not understand modern young people. They seemed, Mrs. Carey had said, to have no idealism, no sense of adventure, they thought so much of their comfort—possibly Mrs. Carey was wrong? But almost she thought she agreed with her. In their youth, Mrs. Carey and she would have been deeply excited by all that was happening round them. Lady Naylor thought all young people ought to be rebels; she herself had certainly been a rebel. But since the War they had never ceased mouching. She herself had had a deep sense of poetry; she remembered going to sleep with Shelley under her pillow. She used to walk alone in the mountains and hated coming in to meals. Mrs. Carey had noticed that Nona would not miss a meal for anything—she was unpunctual always but never absent. But perhaps Mrs. Carey misjudged the girl? Mrs. Carey and she had passed through periods of profound unhappiness. And yet their youth was a golden period; they would not have missed it. It did seem a pity, they both had agreed, to be born middle-aged.