The Yellow Admiral (25 page)

'Directly, sir,' said the waiter. 'I will tell the barber to step in. And I believe you will have a pleasant ride. The day is clearing from the east.'

So it was, and before the chaise was half-way to Woolcombe the sun heaved up his brilliant rim above Morley Down. This was very familiar country now and presently they were running along the side of Simmon's Lea: far over he could make out three riders and a man running with them, far down towards the mere, a woman and two children, one of whom he could have sworn was his daughter if the little figure had not been riding astride: but the runner was certainly Padeen.

'The next on your right,' he called to the post-boy.

'I know it, sir,' said the post-boy, smiling back at him. 'Our Maggie is in service there.' He swung the chaise into the forecourt.

'The farther wing,' said Stephen, since that was where Diana, Clarissa and Brigid lived: he would pay his respects to Sophie later; and to Mrs Williams, in the west wing, later still.

'Just put these inside the door,' he said as he paid the post-boy. 'The brown-paper parcel I shall carry myself.'

He walked up the stairs and opened the door gently. As he had expected, Diana was still in bed, pink and sleepy. 'Oh Stephen,' she cried, sitting up and opening her arms. 'What joy to see you - I was thinking of you not five seconds ago.' They embraced: she looked at him tenderly. 'You are surprisingly well,' she said. 'Have you had breakfast?' Stephen nodded. 'Then take off your clothes and come into my bed. I have countless things to tell you.'

'Dear me, Stephen,' she said, lying back, her hair, her black hair wildly astray on the pillow and her blue eyes filled with a splendid light. 'I have a thousand things to tell you, but you have driven them all out of my mind.' She stroked the limp arm lying over her bosom for a while and then said, 'Tell me, have you just come from the fleet? Are you on leave? Is Jack with you?'

'I am not. I am just come down from London. I have not seen Jack these many weeks: he is still with the blockading squadron.'

'Then you don't know that my Aunt Williams came to live here after her friend Mrs Morris ran off with that odious manservant they had - Briggs. Just then the west wing was being done up and oh such quantities of other things, so she was put into Jack's room and there, poking and prying everywhere, she found a box of letters that silly goose Amanda Smith wrote him from Canada, telling him he had got her with child: and certainly she begged him to go through the motions, you know. These Aunt Williams seized and ran to Sophie as fast as ever she could and poured out all her bile and Methody cant about fornication and so on, working the poor girl up into a frenzy of self-righteousness and jealousy. It had always astonished me that a woman with as much sense as Sophie - and she is no fool, you know - can be so influenced by her mother, who is a fool, a downright great God-damned fool, even where money is concerned, which is saying a great deal. But there it is. Sophie wrote him a letter with all kinds of high-flown Drury-Lane stuff: and when the poor fellow came posting up from Plymouth to say he was sorry and should never do it again she turned him away, clean away. So away he went, with a parting shot about goddam ill-natured unforgiving shrews that went home. And she has been crying her eyes out ever since.'

'Poor soul, poor soul. But it was an ill-fated marriage. She has never taken pleasure in the act itself: she has always dreaded pregnancies: and her deliveries have been extremely painful. It has long seemed to me that jealousy and frigidity or at least tepidness are in direct proportion to one another. And Jack is what is ordinarily called a very full-blooded man.'

'I dare say you are right about frigidity and jealousy. But I believe you are wrong in calling Sophie frigid. Certainly, when her mother is by, I think she would be a poor companion for a lively, eager man - indeed, Jack would never have got her into his bed at all if she had not run away in a ship, far from her mother's eye. And then again I have it on the best authority that Jack is no artist in these matters. He can board and carry an enemy frigate with guns roaring and drums beating in a couple of minutes; but that is no way to give a girl much pleasure. In better hands she would, I am sure, have been a very likely young woman; and oh so much happier.'

'Clearly, you know more about these things than I.'

'She has a lovely body still, in spite of these children,' said Diana. 'But what is the use of a lovely body if neither you nor anyone else enjoys it?'

'Sure it is a great waste: the great shame of the world.'

'Clarissa, who knows a great deal about the subject, and I - but Lord, I have left out a most important part. I never told you that Aunt Williams is gone back to Bath. Mrs Morris's fellow turned out to have several wives already and he has been taken up for bigamy, false pretences, personation, forgery, theft and God knows what, a right wrong 'un. And Aunt Williams is to be the prime witness for the prosecution. She is so proud and important - swears she will never leave till the man is hanged and she and her friend will end their days together - I bought them a little place just off the Paragon.'

'Barham Down is sold then? How clever of you.'

'No, no. That is another thing I was forgetting. After you had been gone a while I began to think it was just Goddamned silly to squalor along on two hundred a year when you have an enormous great diamond like the Blue Peter. I happened to mention it to Cholmondeley - I still had his coach until a little while ago - and he agreed it was great nonsense: why did I not borrow fifty thousand or so until our affairs were settled? He could easily arrange it in the City. So I said yes, and now I am absolutely swimming in money. Do let me give you some money, Stephen dear.'

'Sweetheart, honey, you are kindness itself, but our affairs are already settled. They are just as they were, or even somewhat better; my loss of the receipt did not signify, and I shall unpawn your bauble tomorrow. Now I come to think of it,' he went on, stalking like Adam across the room to his brown-paper parcel, 'here is a present to go with the jewel.' He unwrapped a swathe of Lyons silk velvet, blacker than the darkest night.

After several shrieks of rapture she thanked him very prettily, congratulated him on his brilliant conduct in putting their affairs in order - she had always been sure that he could do it, however complicated, wrapped a fold or so about her pure white torso, and having collected her thoughts she went on, 'You would not believe the difference in Sophie with her mother gone. For some time Clarissa and I had been trying to comfort her, trying to make her understand that men and most women see these things quite differently, that for a man to leap into a welcoming bed does not mean treason, felony or real, serious unfaithfulness at all. She scarcely minded what we said. But once it was known that Aunt Williams was settled in Bath with Mrs Morris, busy buying chintz and swearing affidavits, Sophie listened much, much more attentively.'

'How I wish I had heard you.'

'You would have learned a good deal, I believe.'

'That is what I mean. Little notion, very little notion do I possess of the way women talk among themselves, above all on such matters.'

'And we went on about the very intense delight there is or ought to be in love-making - I said it was an absolute duty to enjoy it and to give as much pleasure in return as ever one could - that the pleasure was infectious. Clarissa spoke, and spoke very much more delicately than I did, quoting some Latin author about the way men like their partners to behave and poor Sophie looked absolutely blank, muttering she thought you just lay there and let it happen. Oh, we said so many things. I made one rather good remark, or so it seemed to me at the time: a man does like some mark of appreciation of his efforts, you know. Then I said, but in a tone I thought she would understand, that what she most urgently needed was a really kind, gentle and considerate lover to put her in tune and show her what all the talk and poetry and music and fine clothes were really about, and how it justified them all. A man like Captain Adeane, who danced with her at all the last Dorchester assemblies and who was so discreetly particular. Do you know him, my dear?'

'I believe not.'

'He is a soldier, and he has a big place behind Colton, kept for him by a rather young and skittish aunt. Being so absurdly handsome, he is usually called Captain Apollo. He will have nothing whatsoever to do with girls, but the young married women of the neighbourhood - well, I will not say that they actually stand there in lines, but I believe he is a fairly general consolation. He gave a splendid ball last week.'

'I should like to meet the gentleman.'

'Oh, and another thing we told her, perhaps the most important of all, we both insisted upon it much, was that there was nothing, nothing so bad for you, or for your looks, as self-righteousness. Nothing so wholly unamiable and souring as that habitual put-upon expression of discontent and implied reproach. The only thing to do, if you knew your lover or husband or whatever was being unfaithful, was to pay him back in his own coin, not out of wantonness or revenge but to avoid worse: to avoid self-righteousness. For having done that you could never be a martyr again or put on a martyr's horrid face. She cried shame on us for saying such dreadful things: we were really quite immoral and she was ashamed for us. But she did not sound very convincing - she did not hurry away, either - and presently she said, yes, that was very well, but what about babies? People really could not keep having babies right and left. Of course not, we said: did she really think that babies were inevitable? Yes, said she: that was what she had always understood. So we told her, and I must say Clarissa was amazingly well-informed; though she did say that trusting to the moon - to the calendar - alone was not absolutely safe.'

'Dear Clarissa. I believe I saw her riding this morning, a great way off.'

'Yes. She is a very tolerable horsewoman now. She took the children out at break of day: they have little Connemara ponies, very sweet mannered. Oh, Stephen, I must show you my Arabs... but there is one thing that worries me.

Throw me my drawers, will you? Sophie breakfasts at nine, and she is sure to ask us. And it is that we might just possibly have overdone things - that she might have taken me literally, Sophie does tend to take things literally. But anyhow he joins his regiment in Madras next week, so...'

'Stephen, dear, how very splendid you look!' cried Sophie, embracing him.

'Ain't I the beauty of the world?' said he, spreading the arms of his fine new coat and advancing one leg of his satin breeches. 'Lewd seamen belonging to other ships took to calling "Old do' Any old do'?" like rag-pickers when I was rowed by, and it did so grieve the poor Bellonas, from the captain to the humblest ship's boy, not a week from the Marine Society's depot. So I have turned myself out like a peacock in all his glory or like a whole band or screeching of peacocks While he was talking in this airy, somewhat disconcerted manner, his grave eye told him that the beauty of the world in fact stood there before him, tall, straight, and in the very height of her charming bloom.

A hand plucked his coat: turning and looking down he saw pink Brigid beaming up, with the promise of as much beauty and even more 'Dear dear Papa' she said 'how very, very happy I am to see you. I have breeches for riding, do you see, and I would not lose a minute changing them. May I sit next to you?'

Charlotte and Fanny came and made their bobs, looking stupid and awkward. George bade him welcome with an open happy smile very like his father's. Stephen kissed his old friend Clarissa and with Brigid on his other side he sat down by Sophie. 'You have not just come back from Bellona?' she asked.

'Not at all. I have been in London and elsewhere this age.'

'When did you last see Jack?'

'No memory for dates have I, but it was a great while since.'

'He had not had any letters from me?'

'He had not. We all complained most bitterly of the want of post. Yet apart from that he was looking well and cheerful - extremely busy with his patrolling and working up the ship's company. I hope to see him even better in a day or two's time, when I rejoin. I hear he has taken a splendid prize.'

'We had so hoped you would stay for Christmas,' she cried.

'No, my dear honey. I only paused in my flight to see you all. At eleven o'clock a post-chaise from Dorchester is coming to take me to Torbay by way of a village whose name escapes me.'

'Nonsense,' said Diana. 'I shall drive you down as I drove you down before, but this time in our own coach. Sophie, forgive me: I must have the horses readied and put on some decent clothes.' She vanished.

'Oh I shall come, I shall come, I shall come on the box!' cried Brigid, bouncing as she sat.

'No you shall not, my dear,' said Stephen. 'Never in life.'

'Certainly not,' said Sophie. 'There is the dancing-master and Miss Hay.'

'I shall ask Mama,' said Brigid: and at the door, 'I shall certainly go.'

Never in life, he had said, and no gentle wheedling in Irish, no tears would move him: added to this there was the monstrous injustice that Padeen, the great traitor, was going, standing up behind in a fine livery Coat. And with Diana gone Sophie was obliged to say, 'Dear Brigid, how sad it would be if your father's last sight of you was tears and an angry, slobbered face. Run away and put yourself in order, brush your hair and find a new handkerchief. Stephen, I am just going to scribble a couple of lines to Jack. Please will you give them to him, with my dear, dear love?'

She hurried away to her desk, a little satinwood bonheur du jour that had belonged to Jack's mother, and after some hesitation she wrote, 'Dear Jack - may I beg for forgiveness? Oh how I hope you are a better-natured creature than I was. Love S.' She sealed it, not without misgivings about its want of style, dignity, possibly of correctness, and ran back to the steps where everyone was already gazing at the fine dark-green coach with Diana on the box, Stephen beside her, Padeen up behind, and grooms holding the horses' heads.