To the North (28 page)

“I don’t think,” said Cecilia severely, “that that would be at all a good advertisement for your bureau. You ought to travel.”

Emmeline, whose own indecision was really far more acute —for the first time in her life her plans were dependent on someone else’s, for the first time she had to move furtively in the dark—said she might go abroad later, suggesting, with unusual lack of feeling, that Cecilia would do well to make up her own mind. And it was, she said almost sharply, an
agency
, not a bureau.

“Don’t be snappy, my sweet,” said her sister-in-law, surprised.

There was no doubt that Emmeline’s temper was less angelic, or that her candour, while still beyond question, had lost transparency. They felt this at Woburn Place. Lady Waters—in the course of a lengthy call at the agency, in which she scared off at least three different clients and removed the last of some circulars for hypothetical friends—had made the same observation: Emmeline lacked equanimity, Emmeline, their relative warned Cecilia, was not herself: it was clear that some strain had arisen between her and Peter Lewis, and that in consequence clients were dropping off. Upon Cecilia’s sharply saying that this was nonsense, Lady Waters reported to Gerda that clearly some strain had arisen between Cecilia and Emmeline, for poor Cecilia was not herself at all.

“I only met Mrs. Summers once,” Gerda said guardedly. “And, if you remember, she was not herself that day either. Or so you said.”

“No one can be
more
herself than Cecilia: she is touchingly open-hearted. She seemed so well at Farraways, but of course the place is like home to her, one can see her light up when she arrives. … I sometimes wonder if there is not something a shade unnatural about Emmeline.”

“How unnatural?” asked Gerda hopefully.

“It would be hard to explain.”

“Frank says he met her once. But she wouldn’t, of course, be his type.”

At her own mention of Frank Gerda became very conscious and Lady Waters looked thoughtful. The Daimler, slipping and stopping in the afternoon traffic of Regent Street, took Lady Waters, who had had lunch with Cecilia, with Gerda to see some pictures. The wettest weather was over, the day made a sulky concession to someone’s idea of summer. Gerda, who had lunched all alone at Fuller’s on salad and ices, then exposed herself (or so she imagined) to much disagreeable attention while waiting at Carrington’s corner for Lady Waters, who was unpunctual, anticipated their afternoon of appreciation with some despondency. Lady Waters, however, had met the artist. Gerda’s shares with her patroness, just at the moment, seemed rather low: having heard much too much of Cecilia she could not help introducing the subject of Frank.

This was a success: Lady Waters, looking into her deeply, said she must put Frank right out of her mind, at least for the present.

“But he is so sympathetic.”

“I liked Frank,” said Lady Waters. “But men who are sympathetic are not, alas, always dependable. Julian Tower seems sympathetic but I do not think he is treating Cecilia at all well. I do not expect he means to play fast and loose, but I don’t think he can quite realise what he is doing; she cares for him more than she knows. I’m afraid, Gerda, that Julian and Frank are both men who prefer what they have not got.”

“Oh, Frank’s really not like that!”

Gerda glanced at a strip of mirror to see herself blushing; her friend’s acute silence remained a strong comment upon the blush. She took more interest in Gerda for the rest of the afternoon.

The Blighs’ plans for August were still upon the knees of Lady Waters, who had told Gerda, and later had Gilbert to lunch to repeat this to him, that it became imperative for them to get right away together and talk things out. Gilbert agreed, with the reservation that he should also like to play golf and a little bridge; Gerda, who did not play golf, agreed to go any distance their friend thought suitable provided there should be something to look at when they were not talking things out. Casino, cathedral, she was indifferent; she thought for her nerves’ sake she ought to sun-bathe. “But suppose,” she said, “we should really
quarrel
out there? It would look so silly to come back separately; besides, I really cannot look after luggage.” Lady Waters said she had understood things could hardly be worse than they were, and Gerda assented meekly. But then what to do with the babies? Gilbert’s mother was selfish, her mother was going to Switzerland. It could but occur to the Blighs how nice it would be if the babies were asked to Farraways. But their babies, too far short of adolescence, did not interest their friend.

“You see, we can’t talk things out with the babies
there
”

Lady Waters agreed that this might be difficult. As the Blighs could not hope to enjoy themselves, no one could call them selfish; all the same, she felt bound to remind Gerda that her and Gilbert’s relationship was not to each other alone; it was triangular—or, recollecting the number of babies—more strictly, square. “Oh, I
know
” Gerda agreed. She was feeling, in spite of Frank, quite the little mother and had bought, while waiting for Lady Waters, two small frilly sunbonnets… . They arrived at the gallery: Lady Waters, holding her private view tickets, swept upstairs, Gerda bobbing anxiously in her wake. Someone suspiciously like Tim Farquharson, with a young woman in scarlet, slipped out by another door as they came in.

Emmeline, her official morning quite broken up by the length of Georgina’s visit, and by Miss Armitage’s plain view of the visit, expressed in sniffs and some glaring silences, could not get down to much work in the afternoon. She had been out late with Markie; her head swam, her eyes were heavy; any jar in the office clanged on her nerves. At about four o’clock she left Peter to it and drove home to Oudenarde Road; mortified by this desertion she took a low view of herself and locked up the car despondently. She went round by the garden—hat off, pushing back her hair that felt close and heavy—and wearily mounted the steps to the drawing-room window. Undisturbed shadows, calm outlines of doors and furniture, a bee drumming over a bowl of sweet peas on the indoor silence, all promised solitude.

But Julian, solitary and from his attitude waiting, was in the drawing-room; he stood, back to the window, looking at one of Cecilia’s books. More books, aslant on the table, must have been put down restlessly: two cigarettes were ground into the white jade shell. That Julian should smoke in her drawing-room before Cecilia’s arrival argued in him (had Emmeline noticed) unusual tension. Surprised that he should not have heard her come up the steps—for by his whole air he was listening, though tuned, perhaps, with that exclusiveness of close attention only to pick up sounds from the hall—Emmeline paused in the window. Seeing her shadow, he turned.

“Hullo, Julian, I’ve come back early.”

“How very nice!”

“Isn’t Cecilia here?”

“She wasn’t sure of her movements, so I said I’d wait.”

The meeting, though friendly on both sides, even affectionate, was not quite easy: both felt the shock of a presence on taut nerves. Emmeline sat on the end of the sofa and smiled at him, pushing her hair back, but said she could not stay: she was going to have a bath. Her manner, halting and even childish, put Julian in charge: bringing out his cigarette-case mechanically he found himself doing the honours.

“I don’t smoke.”

“I remember,” he said, discomfited.

What Emmeline wanted most was to lie full length on the sofa, eyes shut, feet over the end, infinitely relaxing in nerve and muscle. Checked in this, she had hardly energy left to walk upstairs. Fixing on Julian her gentle, unfocused gaze, pulling absently at her hat-ribbon with long fingers, she said no more.

“Look here, Emmeline: you’ve been doing too much.”

Touched by the note of authority—and what a comfortable relative he might make!—she explained that this was a specially busy season, that their campaign was taking effect and clients were going in dozens to places they’d never heard of. She added that they had a secretary who clicked reproach at them like a waiting taxi.

“Not your Miss Tripp?”

“No … we rather wore her out.”

“So she left you?”

“She’s having a holiday.”

He could feel her collecting her thoughts at a distance and speaking to him from a long way off. Something it was an effort for her to see round or over must take up her whole foreground. He would have liked to take momentary but entire command of her life, take away the felt hat on whose brim her fingers kept nervously closing, say: “Either sit right down or go, my dear,” most of all, to sponge Markie clean off her slate—to undo, in fact, what was not undoable. Small exasperations, defeats, curiosities that kept pricking his love for Cecilia alive could play no part in feeling for Emmeline: he asked himself what in her could have been the first object of Markie’s rapacity, and whether even that quickest, most potent and brutal of vanities could realise itself in a single act of destruction.

Emmeline, by coming so softly and suddenly in when all his thoughts were Cecilia’s, renewed with him her first appeal, something less disturbing and rarer than charm or beauty. Her presence, so cool to his heated and anxious mood, could have been pure refreshment. But he was haunted—still so clearly seeing her that first night in her silver dress in the alcove, watching ice tip about in her glass—by some quality she had lost: perhaps simply composure. Stumbling upon each other in this empty hour, they both seemed cast up—wrecked in fact, for with each of them something had miscarried—on a bleak little island of intimacy, too small to explore.

Against Markie he felt a profound and disturbing anger. But with Julian anger turned inwards, and while sapping with long roots his nervous being put up few outward shoots. Though her weariness and distraction brought the partisan in him to its most militant, what could he do? Aggression appeared preposterous as the practice of duelling to his fatally mild temper. He had, too, to admit, with the bitterest of inward smiles, that having gained so little ground with Cecilia he had no right on behalf of Emmeline to that transported possessiveness that in more vigorous ages sent the brother out with the whip. In the holy war reason plays no part: in Julian feeling was shredded by cold good sense. Championship has to discount in the woman anything but passivity, to deny that she could not have been undone without some exercise, however fatal, of her discretion and was in fact her own to ruin. Had he every privilege, were he far more than his sister-in-law’s so far ineffective suitor, Emmeline would not, he saw clearly, tolerate for a moment his interference. She still believed herself happy; untouchable resolution showed even in her lassitude like a mountain-top on a too clear sky. More, her gentleness masked every shade of will from contrariness to fanaticism. There is one kind of sublime officiousness, anger’s or love’s, that is overruling: pure anger crystallises its object, the seducer becomes the abstract of appetite or the thief. But Julian’s was impure; horrified reason played too great a part in it; he could not pack Markie —engaging, rational, witty, intensely social—into the box of one idea and run a sword through. He was not disinterested, being aware of sheer man-to-man envy of Markie for cutting so much ice.

Emmeline dropped her hat to the floor. “No,” she said, “leave it—” and sat looking down. “I’m sorry I’m sleepy; I so seldom see you. It must be the time of year.”

“I know,” he said sadly, “we never meet.”

“At that party, you asked why we hadn’t, and I said I was out all the time or else having a bath. Though it sounds like what people do say at a party, I think it was true. This house is Cecilia: when I come in I see her, simply, whether she’s in or out. Nothing feels part of me, yet I live here too. I feel I leave nothing but steam in the bath. Is your house ever like that?”

“It may well be: I don’t know.”

“Who wants to know?—You’re quite right. Accounts do balance, or should, but oneself never comes out: it is waste of time. All the same, I should like to live
somewhere
; it would feel more natural. If you were to marry, Julian, your wife would locate you: somewhere would become special, you’d know where you were. But no one could do that for me, and no one seems to expect me to do it for them. When I put cups and saucers away in the office cupboard, it feels as though they had flown there; even boiling our kettle isn’t anything like the pleasure it would be to someone else. When I plug the kettle in, then see it boil, I know there is something I’m missing— You know Markie, don’t you?”

“A little,” said Julian, leaning against the mantelpiece. A lustre tinkled, the pretty parade of objects, fans, figurines and boxes, continued behind his shoulder.

“If I died,” said Emmeline, “it wouldn’t—though I expect you would all be sorry—be very noticeable. But if Cecilia were dead, every time I looked at those ornaments I should think: ‘How terrible.’—You don’t know Markie well?”

“We meet now and then.”

“People seem to think a good deal of him?”

“I know few men of his age with such a sound reputation: he ought to go a long way.”

“He is nice, isn’t he?”

“Very,” said Julian, smiling.

“You don’t have to agree,” said Emmeline, “some people don’t like him. Cecilia, for one, doesn’t like him at all… . He doesn’t live in the Temple, you know; he has a flat in Lower Sloane Street, over his sister’s house. His sister is Mrs. Dolman, her husband is something to do with gas: those houses are very big. He has a lift for things to come up in, and when he wants to talk to the cook he whistles: when he talks to the sister they telephone. So it is quite independent. Yes, he said he knew you a little. We once saw you having lunch.”

Julian nodded, and named the restaurant.

“He and I don’t know many people in common, so I remember. Do you really remember? It was a hot day.”

“You wore a green dress.”

“It seems so long ago.”

“I was with my sister,” said Julian, not kowing what else to say.

“However happy one is,” she went on, with more than her usual air of inconsequence, “one is glad of a friendly face. Is that why one asks friends to weddings?” She watched the bee glitter above the sweet peas and circle out of the window. “People seem so pleased when people marry: is that why they go to weddings?”