To the North (4 page)

“I see. But with so much forethought surely your clients are always only too safe?”

“Oh yes, physically,” she said with some contempt. “But what everyone feels is that life, even travel, is losing its element of uncertainty; we try to supply that. We give clients their data: they have to use their own wits. ‘Of course’—we always say to them—’you may not enjoy yourselves.’”

“I see… . Will you send me one of your circulars?”

“I wonder,” said Emmeline, raising her eyebrows anxiously, “if that
is
such a very good slogan? It seems to need some explaining— Forgive my asking, but after all you are one of the public: do you think you have taken the point now?”

“Yes,” Julian said gravely. “It has made me want to begin to travel all over again.”

“That was what we hoped,” said Emmeline, brightening. “Of course,” she said naively, “we charge quite a high commission. But we take personal care of clients: we are beginning to get well known.”

“Where are your offices?”

“Woburn Place. They are a little expensive, so far.”

“Still, I believe in facade. May I come round one day and talk to you about Central Europe?”

“Yes, do come, and I’ll show you that graph of civic intelligence. Where do you want to go to in Central Europe?”

“I—I hadn’t quite thought.”

“Then,” she said—and for a moment lifted from his white tie the eyes of an ecstatic—”you could really go anywhere?”

“More or less,” agreed Julian, elated in spite of himself.

“Come round soon,” said Emmeline, “and we’ll talk this over. If you’re busy all day, come round after hours, we sometimes stay open till half-past six and have sherry for clients. They come in when they’re back and give us their impressions: we get them tabulated. It keeps us in wider touch. My partner can’t move, he gets sea-sick and air-sick and quite often train-sick, and I haven’t got time to go everywhere. So we are glad to work in with clients.”

“You don’t deal only with Bloomsbury?”

“No,” said Emmeline. A shade of distinct displeasure passed over her face; evidently that kind of thing had been said before. “All round Woburn Place,” she said fluently, “there are temperance hotels full of people from Wales and the North, so intoxicated at having left home at all that they are ready to go on anywhere. When they walk round the squares after breakfast they see our posters.”

“Do they walk round the squares after breakfast?” said Julian doubtfully.

“Yes,” said Emmeline, finishing up her tea.

A couple, having passed up and down several times looking fiercely into the alcove at Julian and Emmeline, sat down at last on the stairs just below the settee. The girl had a backless dress and a mole on one shoulder-blade. She leant up close to her partner in speechless affection, dropped her glass downstairs, giggled resignedly and had a drink out of his. The atmosphere grew less temperate.

“Like one currant in icing,” said Julian.

“What, what?”

“That spot on her back.”

“Oh dear, I can’t see it!” said Emmeline in despair. He glanced at the white roses pinned to her shoulder, the soft curtain of hair falling over her cheek as she leant forward beside him, trying to focus the other girl’s back. He remembered what a cool note her name struck in Cecilia’s talk. Her thin arms, blue-veined inside the elbow, were crossed on her knee; the fingers curled idly up. He tried to say something to bring back her eyes to his own, to command her mild interest and lovely attentive face.

“I’m so glad,” said Julian, “we met at this party.”

“So am I,” Emmeline said, giving up the mole in despair. “I always like parties; for one thing I often meet clients or people who may be. But I really like dancing.”

“Shall we dance?” said Julian, discouraged.

“No, I think the floor is too full.”

A young man, coming downstairs, said: “Emmeline, you have cut me five times.” He showed some disposition to linger.

“I’m so sorry,” said Emmeline.

“Perhaps,” Julian said quickly, “you ought to be talking to somebody else?”

“No; do you want to? Anyhow, I must be going. I never stay late.”

“I think I must have heard your voice on the telephone—”

Emmeline looked so thoughtfully through the young man that he moved away. “You may have,” she said, “I say: ‘Hullo? … all right: hold on!’” Her voice trailed off: too considerate to enquire, she wondered how late it might be. She gazed at Julian, wishing he were a clock.

Had she wished, she could not have seen into him very far; she was short-sighted in every sense. Watching slip past her a blurred, repetitive pattern she took to be life, she adored fact—the exact departure of trains—-and had taught herself to respect feeling. At a dance on a battleship she had been kissed by a sailor while searching the stars for Orion through a pair of opera glasses he lent her. He had breathed hard, knocking the opera glasses out of her hand—but now she remembered more clearly how the launch with her laughing companions ran under the bulk of the ship, and the stars at one startling moment… . Since the sailor, she seemed to have been surrounded by shadowy people, acting without impetus, with no spring of passion to their behaviour, not throwing cracked opera glasses, as he did, into the sea.

She was glad to have met Julian, though he promised to be still one more of those shadowy friends, and was aware of his interest and moderate kindness as of the touch on her shoulder of the white roses at which he glanced so often, or of the silvery folds of her dress falling down in the bright light. Drifts of hearsay came through her memory: that he was either rich or extravagant, solitary or difficult, that he had once been married or would not marry, that he had an aunt or sister living above the Wye valley or near the Severn. She wondered if he loved Cecilia, if she would love him, whether
she
, Emmeline, on the outside of this mystery, would ever love. Nothing could be as dear as the circle of reading-light round her solitary pillow.

“I think perhaps I’ll be going home.”

“Will you tell Cecilia I’m hoping so much to see her?”

“Yes… . You could ring her up.”

He picked up her glass and his and stood up in the staring alcove; she smoothed her dress out and looked down into the hall. There she saw men as trees walking, her mind already at home in the dusk of her white room outside the lamplight. Already spring air began to blow through their house at night: driving up through St. John’s Wood you saw the pear-trees, while bare branches across moonlit walls seemed also to be in blossom. They went downstairs into the noise; as she turned to say Goodnight someone clutched Julian’s arm and said “Julian—” When he got free and turned round again, Emmeline was quite gone.

Back from the party where she had met Julian Tower, Emmeline, shivering slightly before the extinct fire, had unpinned the roses and dropped them into a glass. The Dresden clock stood still at some ghostly hour: this was her last night alone in the house… . The map of Europe was never far from her mind, crowds rushing from platform to platform under the great lit arches, Cecilia’s face sleeping against the cushions as the Anglo-Italian express tore into France from Switzerland on the return journey.

CECILIA WAS INTERESTED TO HEAR THAT EMMELINE HAD met Julian, at that party last night, while one was asleep in the train.

“He’s nice,” she said, “isn’t he? What did he say about me?”

“He asked if you were in Sicily.”

“Nonsense,” exclaimed Cecilia. She said later, “Julian hasn’t got much vitality.”

Cecilia resumed home life at high pressure: before she was into her bath two people had rung up to know whether she had arrived. Then—as she could not bear to miss anyone—she was called twice from her bath to the telephone, and stood steaming and talking, while patches of damp from her skin came through her wrapper. It would have been sad to return unnoticed. All the same, as she lay turning on with her toe more and more hot water, melancholy invaded her. She thought how at sunset the little hills lapped like waves round Urbino, and having brought her whole pile of letters into the bath with her read them, all blotchy with steam, with tears in her eyes, dropping sodden envelopes on to the bathroom floor.

Some quite new friends of Cecilia’s dropped in by car at about ten o’clock: conversation continued till past midnight. Once or twice a shadow passed over Cecilia’s face; she wished she were not overdrawn, she wished she had not picked Markie up in the train and given him her address; she feared she would soon know her visitors far too well; she wished Emmeline would not sit looking through them so gently, with such distaste. “I wish,” she thought once or twice, “I were still in Italy.”

A garage was amongst the advantages of Oudenarde Road. Emmeline’s car, however, was not much use to Cecilia, as Emmeline drove off early to Woburn Place and seldom returned before dinner. Sometimes they drove to the same late party together, Emmeline’s silver slipper pressed delicately on the accelerator, sometimes the time and place of their dinner engagements permitted Emmeline to drop Cecilia. On other occasions Cecilia had to take taxis, and very expensive they were. She could not help feeling that Oudenarde Road was rather far out: Emmeline, however, had been so anxious to settle here. The morning after Cecilia’s return Emmeline, having started the car, looked in to remind Cecilia she must ring up Lady Waters and tell her all about Italy.

“She must ring me up,” said Cecilia. “I’m half dead.”

“That’s as you feel,” said Emmeline, dispassionate.

“Do I
look
terribly tired?” enquired Cecilia, rolling anxiously round to face the light on her pillows. Her breakfast tray was beside her; she had no intention of getting up.

“Oh, no.”

“You can’t see from there,” said Cecilia crossly. “You never can see how frightful anyone looks—I do wish, darling, you needn’t take a despatch-case about; it makes you look so fussy.”

“I am very busy: I brought work home.”

“How
is
Woburn Place?”

“Very well indeed,” said Emmeline, shining. “We really are beginning to get known.”

“Yes, I’m sure you are. Do you find people pay up, or is it like running a hat shop? We really shall need some money— How much is six hundred lire in pounds?”

Emmeline told her.

“I shall really have to give up going out for a bit; I cannot afford ten shillings a night for taxis. It’s extraordinary about money; I
don’t
think I indulge myself, do you? I suppose I shall have to ask people up here instead; ten shillings isn’t much if they’re fond of one. But then, of course, the house bills go up. Perhaps I had better give up my ‘cello lessons; I don’t seem to be getting on. Do you think I had better give up the ‘cello? Don’t
hover
, darling; you can’t be in such a hurry as all that. One really must be serious about money.”

“I’m sorry,” said Emmeline, “but we’re sending a Congregational Choir to Paris next week and we can’t think what they’re to do at nights. They are very broad-minded, but ladies are in the party—”

“—Send them to waxworks— Or shall I give up the club?”

“Let’s talk about money to-night.”

“No, that gives me a headache. Besides, I am going out.”

“By the way,” said Emmeline, “Georgina says I am not to let you pervade me: she says you have a dominant personality.”

“I’m getting fat,” said Cecilia gloomily, “which is far worse. Emmeline—”

But Emmeline had faded out of the door and gone. With a sigh, Cecilia plucked two more grapes from the bunch on her tray. She was a little greedy, but, though the attractive lines of her face and figure showed no bones anywhere, did not put on weight. Peeling the grapes, she wondered how best to avoid Markie if he rang up, and exactly how piqued she should feel if he never did. She regretted, also, having sent Julian from Gubbio, in reply to his rather long letter, a picture post-card, though chosen with some care. She wondered what to put on… . Before she was half dressed she had vacillated to the telephone by her bed and rung up Georgina—Lady Waters insisted that they should call her Georgina, saying she did not feel like an aunt or an elder cousin at all, but an intimate— They had a long and, for Cecilia, unwisely intimate talk. While Emmeline simply said, gently and not very often, that she wished Georgina’d been dead for a hundred years, Cecilia daily declared her to be a scourge and a menace. Yet it was Cecilia who telephoned, who was magnetised to Rutland Gate. She could seldom bring herself to disclaim those masterpieces of temperament or caprice attributed to her by her aunt-in-law. And again at moments like this—twenty past ten on a restlessly sunny morning when she was half dressed, had nothing special to do before lunch and was tempted to feel she did not exist—there was no doubt Georgina was reassuring. Cecilia felt herself crystallise over the wire, and recklessly made an appointment for tea.

Hanging up the receiver, Cecilia caught Henry’s eye. There were few photographs in her room and Henry dominated the mantelpiece, his narrow and rather faintly and charmingly equine face expressive of apprehension and some amusement. The photograph fixed a look that in life she had hardly known; the perpetuation of the half-look that in life was so rare and fleeting disconcerted Cecilia. If there had been irony in his affection for her she had not observed it. To the tune of their passion and curiosity, exasperation and tenderness there had been, so far as she was aware, no undertone. Left alone with this photograph, she had entered—not without chagrin or sometimes a faintly cold touch of something about the heart—on quite a new phase in her relations with Henry. Eye to eye through the picture-frame, they built up a whole past they had not shared, became in childhood cheerful, ruthless antagonists, sceptical of one another in adolescence. As man and woman, it seemed, they had still to meet. Sometimes—by those queer interchanges when she was most alone, in the cold widowed solitude of her room—their whole married year seemed annulled; sometimes it seemed they had not been lovers… . In the photograph Henry looked at you like Emmeline, but more guardedly, more satirically. You read the same skating quickness of thought, less resolution, more feeling, the same reluctance or inability to engage oneself closely with life on any terms. In spite of an almost fantastic detachment of manner and delicate frame, Henry had shown more vigour and less detachment than Emmeline—had he not married Cecilia? The face of her husband, remote in anger or invisibly close in passion, was gone: had she known or touched him? All she had touched was dust. But Henry, raising his eyebrows, drawing down a little his upper lip, was still with amusement deprecating something or someone—or perhaps simply deprecating his own amusement.