The Light Heart (23 page)

“No,” said Sue, smiling. “There is no blame. Except possibly to you, for not having the courage to follow your heart when he asked you.”

Phoebe stood up, both hands at her temples in an unconscious gesture of distraction.

“It’s this writing books!” she cried. “You try to do the thing that will
read
well! I
know
I saw myself as the heroine of one of
your romances! You wouldn’t allow one of them to break her troth, would you?”

“I might, now that you mention it,” Sue said thoughtfully. “I still could. It hadn’t occurred to me, that’s all.”

O
LIVER’S
letter was forwarded to New York, and Phoebe read it alone in her room in Eden’s Madison Avenue house. Everyone had been the soul of tact, and Bracken had given her the first month’s allowance at once so she would have pocket money, and had had a typewriter sent up from the office for her exclusive use. She had bought a supply of paper and carbons and begun her book. A little later, when the society editor’s assistant got married, Phoebe was to have a chance to work on the newspaper.

She opened Oliver’s letter with cold, nervous fingers. Miles’s had been bad enough, with its magnanimous tone which almost amounted to relief on his part that she had changed her mind. Miles had taken it with dignity and restraint. It was far worse to face Oliver’s unfamiliar handwriting.

Phoebe sat still with the tears dripping down on the page, till Oliver’s precious words were blurred and damp. Then she blotted them carefully and put the letter back in its envelope and laid it away beneath her handkerchiefs in a bureau drawer, and went back to the typewriter.

The book was published late the following autumn. It was fresh, it was young, it was gay, and it caught on. By the time the advance copies arrived she had begun another, and was doing a series of special interviews for Bracken which had caused favourable comment in the newspaper world. Bracken said she had the touch.

Johnny Malone, who worked in the City Room, said she was gilt-edged, and had nominated himself as her permanent and exclusive watchdog, first because of his old friendship with her brother Fitz, and second because he at once fell in love with her. He took her to Martin’s, and saw that she met the right people. He took her to Churchill’s, and taught her the latest dance-steps. He took her to Guffanti’s, and showed her how to eat spaghetti without cutting it. He kept her laughing, with his own brand of slangy, hard-boiled wit.

The first time Johnny proposed she almost accepted him out of sheer gratitude. To be wanted by somebody again—not to
look a fool to herself any more—to be desired again, and treated tenderly, for one’s own triumphant sake—it restored her self-respect to know that Johnny was in love with her, for it had been a blow to her pride as well as to her heart that Oliver had not been able to accept the offer of herself when she made it.

Johnny was first of all a good playfellow, honest and kind and devoted. He was nice to look at, with a smiling snub-nosed Irish face, very clean, and a rather stocky build, sufficiently tall. But she had to admit to herself from the beginning that she was not going to be in love with him. It was no good wondering why, or if, or when—she just wasn’t. So she said No, and Thank you, and Can’t we be friends, and she couldn’t help thinking the whole thing sounded like something she had written, or that
somebody
had written…. Johnny took it very well, and said who said they weren’t friends, and that she hadn’t heard the last of it.

When Dinah and Bracken set out in June, 1904, for their annual visit to England, Phoebe refused without a pang their cordial invitation to go along, and was able to keep on laughing with Johnny. England was over, for her. If ever she went abroad again it would be to visit Rosalind at the castle at Heidersdorf, and to look up the Spragues’ legendary Aunt Sally in the South of France on the way. Aunt Sally was Father’s only sister, who had been a great belle in the ’sixties and had buried three wealthy husbands since then, and now lived in Cannes in more-than-Oriental-splendour and rather dubious company, Cousin Eden said, but Phoebe was
convinced
that she would make a wonderful story if you could get it. Phoebe and Johnny often talked about Aunt Sally and the story that could be written about her, until one time Johnny said, “Let’s us get married and go to Cannes on our honeymoon and see Aunt Sally.” And Phoebe had laughed at that too, but not in a way to hurt his feelings.

The second book, in the spring of 1905, was surer, and went a little deeper, and commanded some respect. The third one swept the country with mounting sales. The fourth one topped the third,
for Phoebe had found a formula more or less her own and was developing an easy, original style which caught on. Each summer Dinah and Bracken went to England, and each summer Phoebe refused with thanks to accompany them. Each summer Johnny proposed the honeymoon in Cannes and was gently laughed off.

Two things never changed, while the years slipped away. No one ever measured up to Oliver in her heart. And every month she wrote a letter to Rosalind in Germany. The replies were more irregular, but they always came. Prince Conrad’s father had died before Christmas the year of
Rosalind’s
marriage
, and just as Virginia had prophesied, all the lovely dresses had to be put away for a year’s mourning and by then much of the trousseau finery was out of style and had to be—very lavishly—replaced by Paris dressmakers. The honeymoon had been cut short by a summons to the old man’s bedside, and after the funeral they had returned to England only briefly to wind things up there at the Embassy, before Prince Conrad assumed the dignities and duties of a reigning prince on his ancestral estates in Silesia. His mother had been dead for many years, and his Aunt Christa on his father’s side ruled the
Schloss
at Heidersdorf, so that his English bride’s position was bound to be equivocal and uncomfortable from the beginning.

At first Rosalind’s letters tried to conceal her own disillusion and despair and were merely schoolgirlish, brief, and
disappointing
to Phoebe, whose pen obeyed her thoughts freely instead of standing between them and the paper. Patiently she began to ask questions, and open discussions, and try to get at the real Rosalind again as though they were still face to face. Gradually Rosalind’s letters changed, got longer, less stilted, more amusing, as she attempted to convey to Phoebe the fantastic, infuriating, often ludicrous life of a German princess who also happened to be an Englishwoman. Phoebe naturally begged for more of this, and Rosalind’s pride and reticence gave way before her growing need of a confidante.

Phoebe was able to gather that Prince Conrad had little inclination to back up his English wife against his Prussian
aunt, and various awkwardnesses accordingly developed. That is, filtered through Rosalind’s indestructible levity they became awkwardnesses; whereas a different temperament would have magnified them into tragedies. Phoebe began to save the letters from Rosalind, and to read bits of them aloud to her friends, until a sort of Heidersdorf saga took shape in New York, and people were eager for the next chapter. But a desolate homesick strain ran through all the letters. Conrad seemed not to think it necessary to keep his promise that Rosalind should go home to England to visit every year, and extravagant holidays at Nice and Biarritz and St. Moritz were not the same thing. In 1906 she had a son, and barely survived the birth, and was months convalescing, but even the baby did not still her perpetual sense of exile.

News always came too from England, through Virginia and Dinah’s yearly visits there. Virginia had had another girl child, with her customary ease and dispatch. Clare and Winifred each produced another boy, neck and neck, said Archie. But Dinah had begun to wonder. Anyone could do it, even Maia was expecting. She alone had failed.

Oliver never wrote again, and Phoebe never tried to communicate with him. Word of him would arrive obliquely, from time to time, through Dinah or Virginia. He had rejoined the regiment the same autumn he married and they went out at once to India, where Maia lost her first child, a boy. Then in the summer of 1908 a girl was born in England, and lived. Charles had got a Staff appointment at the War Office, with the rank of brevet major, and was highly thought of there. This news was duly passed on to Rosalind by Phoebe, and was not referred to in her reply.

Miles wrote often to Phoebe as he had always done, almost as though nothing had ever happened between them beyond their lifelong friendship, and she was grateful to him for his lack of dramatics over the broken engagement. It almost seemed, as Cousin Sue had once said, that Miles was not the marrying kind; almost as though he felt let off.

Time slid by with little to mark its passing except new successes for Phoebe, whose books paid better than Sue’s had ever done, and started a vogue for rather stylized, understated, somewhat glib romances with a deft touch. Their author also created a vogue—the well-groomed, well-bred, expensively dressed bachelor girl who never indulged in sticky love affairs, whose rejected suitors remained her devoted friends, and whose unapproachable heart became a mystery and a challenge.

Feeling grown up and fully fledged, she left Eden’s Madison Avenue house and took a picturesque apartment in the upper Twenties, with a coloured maid from home to look after her. She furnished it herself with cheerful chintzes and ginghams, and there was always a wood fire in the black marble grate in winter and an iced drink in hot weather for the weary or convivial dropper-in at tea time. And there was always Phoebe, slim and sweet and smiling and a little aloof, with her brushed, shining hair and the Murray cleft in her chin.

Johnny Malone saw it all from the reserved seat section, offering marriage at fairly regular intervals, accepting the inevitable negative with the best of grace, striving not to agonize over the growing list of his competitors nor to drink too much in his hours of despair. Johnny outlasted them all. He had seen her first, and no late-comer ever dislodged him from his pre-empted position as watchdog and court jester. A deep and comfortable affection existed between him and Phoebe, punctuated by flare-ups of Johnny’s much-enduring desire.

Because of Oliver Campion and what he had taught her, and in view of several episodes besides the perpetual devotion of Johnny Malone, there was something soft and chastened and appealing about Phoebe. She had none of the usual stigmata of the unmarried career girl. She was not angular or brittle or aggressively self-sufficient. She expected to have doors opened for her, and chairs placed, and things handed. She was utterly feminine, and enjoyed being treated by infatuated males as though she was a little half-witted.

The twenty-one-year-old Phoebe who had set out from New
York to see Edward VII crowned had been sturdily determined to stand on her own feet, earn her own money, and prove that she could take care of herself, even after she married Miles—for she had expected to look after Miles, rather than the other way about. Having done all these things—except looking after Miles—apparently with the greatest of ease, the present Phoebe found it nothing to wave flags about, and preferred to conceal from her admirers the embarrassing fact that she got more for her serial rights than some of them could earn in a year’s hard work at their own respective jobs. The young Phoebe of the past had even contemplated woman’s suffrage with open-minded interest and approval. Nowadays Phoebe said “suffragettes and people like that” with the implication that one did not know them. She was not by nature a crusader in any cause.

Quite suddenly, in the middle of the 1910 London Season, King Edward died. Bracken and Dinah had just arrived in England and Bracken was therefore on the spot for the funeral, and for the proclamation of George V, whose coronation was announced for the following summer at the end of Court mourning. It was disturbing to Phoebe to realize that Edward’s reign had lasted all of nine years. Her thoughts turned inward and backward unbidden, and she found her eyes wet with tears—a luxury she seldom allowed herself any more.

She brushed them away impatiently, and went to the typewriter and turned out a reminiscent, nostalgic piece about the year of Edward’s crowning, which was bought by a famous woman’s magazine and regarded with such enthusiasm there that they offered her a handsome sum, plus expenses, if she would go to England and report to them exclusively on next year’s ceremony.

It tempted her. Bracken would be pleased and proud. She was sure of a welcome at Farthingale, and the idea of seeing Virginia’s offspring appealed to her. She wondered what Charles was doing by now, and realized that she had actually lost track of Oliver and did not know where he was stationed. She went to the mirror above the black marble mantelpiece in
her little chintz drawing-room, and eyed with some misgiving the glossy young woman who looked back at her—the elaborately waved brown hair, the discreetly carmined lips, the high-waisted, clinging gown were not what Oliver would expect. And while Phoebe felt they were a distinct
improvement
on his remembered image of her, and thought it would be rather fun to present him with this new version of herself which success and self-reliance had wrought—she wondered. Men didn’t change much between twenty-one and thirty, but women grew up, and sometimes they even grew old. Phoebe, turning thirty, was more beautiful than she had ever been, as Johnny could have told her with his eyes shut. But would Oliver behold the change without a shock?