To the North (31 page)

She stood still by the window. “What can it be?”

“Well, look! Perhaps Connie’s wishing us luck.”

“Oh no, she—”

Standing under the lamp with his arm round her, Emmeline read the telegram: she read it through twice:

“Come back Sunday must talk very urgent indeed.—

“Cecilia.”

Emmeline said: “She’s going to marry Julian.” She stared at the post-office writing, so unlike Cecilia’s, while something slid down in her like a dead weight. Timber by timber, Oudenarde Road fell to bits, as small houses are broken up daily to widen the roar of London. She saw the door open on emptiness: blanched walls as though after a fire. Houses shared with women are built on sand. She thought: “My home, my home.”

“She’s going to marry Julian.”

Markie, having quite naturally read the telegram over her shoulder, had put, for a moment, a much more annoying construction upon it. “You don’t think she—”

“No. No, it’s Julian.”

This did, after all, seem likely. Relieved, Markie said with sincere good feeling: “Oh, excellent, splendid: quite the best thing she could do.”

“She wants me home to-morrow.”

“Yes, so I see. But they can’t be in such a hurry as all that.”

“She thinks I’m with Connie.”

“While we know you’re not.” His arm, tightening, felt Emmeline unaccountably tremble. Two moments, Cecilia’s and his, were in conflict: he pulled the telegram not too gently away; those half-shadows behind their talk at Devizes mounting up in him in an impatience ravaging and intense. Damning the bridal Cecilia, he crumpled the paper and threw it into a corner: had they not come here to be alone?

“I know she is right,” said Emmeline, looking round wildly.

“Quite right, quite right.”

“I’m so fond of them both.”

“Well, let’s drink to them.”

Shakily, Emmeline took the glass.

The loneliness of the downs, the great weight of darkness over the cottage, these unfamiliar shadows, a sense of being swept strongly apart on a current from all she had held to, made her that night cling closer to Markie, beseeching from the rough and impersonal contact of passion a little comfort and peace. Silence acute and momentary like a wind standing still came in from the dark outside as Markie turned out the lamp and kicked out the fire. The stairs door swung on the bending candles; one more violent and wordless hour disjointed from life was written over the weekend cottage.

“BUT HOW DID YOU KNOW?” how did you know?” said Cecilia, pausing a moment quite breathless from her quick flow of talk. Her mind ran on ahead, she could hardly wait for Emmeline’s answer, which did not come.

Emmeline, who could formulate nothing, put up a hand to her cheek that still flamed from the sun and speed of the journey, and that departure. It was Sunday evening, soon after seven o’clock: she was just home.

“I suppose,” Cecilia supplied, a shade grimly, “it was what everybody expected.”

“It’s what I hoped.”

“Darling …” Cecilia said, with that odd elation that had not time to be happiness. “I suppose,” she went on, “I seemed crazy, sending that wire. But I came in yesterday, after we’d— after it was settled, feeling so strung up. You had to hear first; the idea of not seeing you until Monday night sent me nearly silly. Still, I suppose it was selfish. Did Connie mind?”

“No,” said Emmeline.

“I didn’t expect you’d be doing anything special.”

“Oh no, we weren’t.”

“Bless you,” exclaimed Cecilia. “Now this feels like home.”

Reading Markie for Connie, it had been terrible. If this were home, one fled here with battered wings: it would not be home long. Still stunned by the day, Emmeline heard Cecilia’s voice from a long way off, and had an impulse to catch at

Cecilia’s long sleeve floating past, as her sister-in-law paced the drawing-room, shaking ash everywhere and excitedly talking, to assure herself she was once more in kind if oblivious feminine company.

To say that Markie had minded would not be adequate. Any talk of return to Cecilia he blithely discredited overnight, and had taken as done with. This morning Emmeline said she was going back; nervousness made her assertive; she could not have put things worse. Upon this, the dead stop of his tenderness, flicked off sharply as electricity, his incomprehension and ice-cold anger had given that hot bright Sunday—downs bald in sunshine, heat quivering in through the cottage doors— the lucidity of a nightmare. He told Emmeline she was mad: that her madness was nothing to him he made plain by a hundred manners of walking away, of releasing himself from her touch, by a cold self-sufficiency that—as he lay, legs crossed, reading on the red sofa, or strolled in the outdoor sunshine— she could never disturb. Yesterday’s unborn pleasure, to-day’s might-have-been hung about the cottage, picking out the harp, the hearth and the pictures in lines of agony, afflicting her senses whatever she touched, wherever she turned. If her presence became an irritant, the cottage too small for them both, this was easily cured by strolling out on to the downs when she came in, by turning unconsciously indoors again when she followed. A profound and slighting contempt for her point of view, that must have underlain at all times his tenderness, was apparent in all that he said and did, most of all in silence. This complete disconnection between them, so disorientating to Emmeline, meant, he made evident, little enough to Markie.

She endured this throughout the morning. Then: “Markie,” she cried, “I won’t go. We’ll stay here tonight. I’m sorry.”

Taking a book from the shelf, Markie turned with raised eyebrows. “Oh?” he said, “Stay here? Why?”

“You know I don’t want to go!”

“Then we don’t see eye to eye: I’m afraid I do.”

“I beg you to stay!”

“We mustn’t upset Cecilia.”

Emmeline, meeting his cold eyes, was startled by what she saw. She exclaimed: “You fight like a woman!”

“You ought to know,” he said, taking his book to the sofa.

Emmeline stood by the fireplace, hands clasped in terrified resolution behind her back. “You
must
listen,” she said. “Because you’re first now, now you’re everyone, was that any reason to hurt Cecilia? Oh,
understand
, Markie: don’t just shut up your brain! What reason have I to give her for not coming back? Look at all the lies she’s believed about this weekend, about my being here with Connie: she thought I went off rather bored because Connie asked me. She knows Connie couldn’t keep me away when she’d said it was urgent. I know this must seem just a small thing, Cecilia’s marrying Julian: I know people keep marrying every day. But she, I—she must want me so much, or she’d never have wired. I’m part of Henry; I mean all
that
to Cecilia: I have to be good to her now. Before all this, before you came, I wouldn’t have understood: now I know how she feels. She wouldn’t have wired if she hadn’t thought I’d be longing to come. How
can
she know how things are with me—you and I, here? All this, changing everything for me, how can she understand? If I don’t go tonight, there is only one thing I can do: I must tell her why not. I couldn’t bear her to think I just failed her for no reason. If I said the car had gone wrong, Cecilia’d think: ‘Why not a train?’”

“Well, why not?” said Markie, turning over a page.

“If I don’t go back I must tell her… . But I couldn’t; I can’t, Markie: it would be too cruel. You don’t know how she feels. She’s … not like us, she wouldn’t ever see why. . : . Just now, when she’s so safe and happy—it would be cruel! You see, she’d think I was ruined. She’d blame herself; she’d never be able to understand— Why did that telegram have to come? Interruptions like this, don’t you see, are a tax on our sort of love. People in love like Cecilia and Julian, people married, have passports everywhere. They don’t get telegrams, nobody sends for them: everyone understands. But you and I—wherever we go there is something to keep us separate. Someone is out to break us. We’re not any nearer each other for being tied up in lies!”

Still saying nothing, Markie turned over another page.

“I think you will kill me,” said Emmeline.

Unnerved by her white face he said: “For God’s sake, don’t make that fuss in here.”

“But you must understand. You may be bitter, you ought to be fair.
Markie
, put that book down! I ask you to put down that book!”

He put down the book politely, keeping his thumb in the place.

“Listen: I give in, I give up. Cecilia’ll just have to bear it. I’ll let things be spoilt between her and me. Could you think I wanted to miss our day? Our minutes are all so precious I never know what to do with them. All I ever wanted, all I ask now is to stay. Every time you and I part it tears me to bits. There is no one but you.”

“If we must really go into all this—my dear Emmeline, you put no one first but yourself. Your will, your conscience, your lunatic sensibility. No doubt you are right, but you can’t have it both ways, you know.”

“I love you. I beg you stay here with me tonight.”

“Love?” said Markie. “Love with you’s simply a theory. You care for nothing but being right. It’s a pity you can’t be natural.”

“Oh, Markie. Natural …”

“You think you’ve done something extraordinary.”

“It made you happy.”

“Oh yes.”

“Whatever I am, forgive me. I only ask you to stay.”

“Quite frankly, I don’t care to stay in a cottage this size with a cold and hysterical woman.”

“I see,” said Emmeline, dropping her voice suddenly.

Fixing her eyes with his cold eyes, he had that uneasy feeling, that quick touch of physical fear again, as though something were going to spring… . She turned away, went to the cupboard and began to put out the plates for lunch… . After lunch she stacked up the plates and wrote a note for the woman, explaining they had been called away, were leaving the ham and some groceries as a present and were sorry they had not had time to eat the eggs. She skewered this note to the ham, left five shillings on the mantelpiece, went upstairs and packed for herself and Markie: the bedroom was too small for two people to pack in at once. She shut the windows and drew the print counterpane over the bed. She forgot to take off the kettle, and left the cornflowers she had picked yesterday in a mug on the window-sill. Markie thanked her for packing for him; he bumped the two suitcases downstairs and into the car. They locked up the cottage and left at about three o’clock.

Neither looked back as the cottage slipped into a fold of the downs: the dazzling white road spun ahead and they made good going. When Emmeline stopped for petrol Markie got out and put through some calls to London: they kept him some time; he apologised pleasantly for the delay. Some plans for the evening: she perfectly understood.

“You must write a nice letter to Connie,” he said as they entered London.

“Yes,” said Emmeline, “she has been very kind.”

In the drawing-room, looking at Emmeline rather uncertainly, Cecilia said they would have, she supposed, to talk plans. But not plans tonight.

“One thing you haven’t told me: when are you and Julian actually getting married?”

“Oh well,” said Cecilia airily, “that depends.”

“Not on me?” said Emmeline, colouring.

“Oh, darling, no: why?”

“There can’t be much to wait for.
There
are your August plans, ready-made.”

“Yes,” Cecilia said, “things do arrange themselves, don’t they. All the same, I naturally feel—”

She broke off. Emmeline said, curious: “What do you naturally feel?”

“—A poor thing,” said her sister-in-law, with a complete change of tone and surprising bitterness. “Not very much of a life. I have flopped all ways; I hang on looking pretty about it, like one of those wretched creepers. First Henry, then you, now Julian. I don’t think you know how I’ve leaned on you— and so dishonestly, too. I say to everyone: ‘Dear vague Emmeline, where would she be without one?’ Simply because I find
cachets févres
for you, and order your dinner. You were too young to know when it first began, then you grew up into it. How you have suffered my foolishness! Now I go on to Julian, all smooth and easy. But what are you going to do?”

“I’ll get a flat: I should like a flat.”

“I wish Julian had married
you
!”

“I do wish he had,” said the smiling Emmeline. She paused, however, and looked at Cecilia, anxious. Now that Cecilia was leaving the Summers, now that Emmeline and what was left of Henry must draw in closer, excluding young Mrs. Tower, it must become daily harder to speak without qualifications and growing reserve. Cecilia tonight, with her busy woman’s loquacity, appeared already remarried. Catching at a veil that thickened between them, Emmeline said almost sharply: “Cecilia, you’re happy? This is all right?”

“Yes,” said Cecilia, “it is. Though you may well ask. Julian really is good; I’ve tried all round in my thoughts to slight him, but I’m not able to any more. I don’t have to pretend with him; we are easy together. If this went wrong, I’d be done for. It’s all far better than I deserve: I cannot feel Julian’s fortunate… . However,” she added, brightening and trying to bite back a smile, “he’s thought it all over, with a thoroughness one can hardly consider flattering: I think he knows what he’s doing.”

“And you do love him?” said Emmeline.

Cecilia turned quickly, surprised more by Emmeline’s manner than by the question. It was on the tip of her tongue to say: “What do you know?” An uneasy presence made itself felt: she went small and transparent before this unknown Emmeline. She said at last: “Yes, I do love him as much as I’m able. I wish there were more of me, but we do know how we stand. I don’t think it does to examine things.”

“No, oh
no
.”

“Emmeline—?”

“No, I’m quite sure you’re right.”

“I feel that I’m honest— Darling, why can’t we adopt you?”

“I’m over age,” said Emmeline thoughtfully.

“I suppose we may have some children. Anyhow, we are finding a house somewhere: one couldn’t possibly live in a flat. Poor Julian, moving his pictures— Darling, what fun it will be when this happens to you!”