To the North (9 page)

“I should much rather play tennis or go for a walk. Do you think we could?”

“Perhaps,” said Sir Robert, brightening. “Perhaps. It would certainly leave more room in the cars. In fact in that case they need only take one car. We will see how the land lies… .”

“We’ll be late: there’s the last bell!”

“The Vicar is always some time in the vestry: he mislays his things. He lost the banns last Sunday, poor fellow. Do you remember him, Emmeline?”

“I don’t think I’ve met him.”

“I could have asked him to drop in to tea if it hadn’t been for that villa.” Sir Robert held open the white gate, they hurried across the churchyard; the last good-humoured bell saying: “Come—come—come!” The straight sunny tombstones looked sociable, fresh wreaths were laid on the breasts of the graves. You could almost see the dead sitting up holding their flowers, like invalids on a visiting-day, waiting to hear the music. Only the very new dead, under raw earth with no tombstones, lay flat in despair: on one grave a whole mass of flowers had wilted; no one had had the heart yet to put any more … As Sir Robert approached, two little boys touched their caps and slid off a tombstone.

On the altar red candle-flames trembled, opaque in long shafts of sun. The bell stopped, the organ had not begun: in the light perpendicular church there was almost complete silence. But in the vestry you heard the choir holding its breath and the Vicar rustling about, still looking for something.

PRESSING BACK WITH A CREAK THE LID of the picnic-basket, Lady Waters took out two thermos flasks and a box of cucumber sandwiches: a Genoa cake followed. “It’s a pity,” she said, “we are still too early for strawberries.”

Her guests smiled but did not say anything. Having motored twenty-five miles they sat on a stump of the Roman villa, their feet in a pit. The car was drawn up at some distance under an oak; the chauffeur paced gloomily round it. Behind them, above the villa, Sunday seemed to inhabit the steep twinkling leafy silence of woods this side of the valley. On a green notice board nailed to a post was neatly set out in white the possible date of the villa, with the conditions under which it was to be seen any day except Sundays. No paling forbade them to prod the masonry, but the mosaics, as Sir Robert expected, were all locked up, and though they had lain on their stomachs on the lid of a kind of cucumber frame they could see through ground glass and wire-netting nothing but their own shadows on what looked like cement.

As Lady Waters said, tea would be very refreshing. The custodian, who lived near by in a gothic cottage picked out in green to match the notice board, was himself at tea with his family; he looked at them cynically out of a latticed window. Gilbert Bligh, as though magnetised, could not help glancing back and back again at the cottage.

He said: “That would be a nice job.”

“Especially on a Sunday,” said Tim bitterly.

“I wonder who gets it. Somebody’s gardener …”

“Gardeners may be cross,” said his wife, “but they are not generally rude.”

“He’s not being rude,” said Gilbert, “he’s just having a look at us. After all, Gerda, a cat—”

“—
Gilbert
!” cried Gerda, biting her lip and writhing. The enforced introduction by Gilbert of proverbs into his talk was a constant annoyance. Gilbert’s reasoning followed the main stream of racial good sense: he frequently rounded up at a point where to avoid a quotation or skirt an aphorism would in itself have been precious. With the oblique and recondite nowadays at a premium, Gilbert could see no reason why he should not affirm the obvious: Shakespeare had done so. “What is the matter, Gerda?” he said mildly.

“Children, children …” said Lady Waters. The Blighs as a turn, she felt, were taking up more than their share of the weekend programme: like a pair of indifferent acrobatic dancers they came bounding again and again from the wings without an encore. This was rather hard on Tim Farquharson. She was seriously annoyed with Sir Robert and Emmeline for staying behind, though circumstances had forced her to conceal her annoyance. She had relied on Sir Robert to stroll with Gerda among the ruins, on Emmeline to engage Gilbert while she had her long-postponed understanding talk with poor Tim. One or two kind words before lunch, and a glance charged with comprehension between the courses had, however, brought Tim up once more to the footlights, in his own view at least. So much cheered was he that, observing the Blighs’ disorder, he concluded that Lady Waters had asked them to show him what he had escaped.

In the Blighs’ present state of exasperated susceptibility, their attention to one another was almost lover-like. They broke off conversations at dinner to glare compellingly at one another across the table; they dogged one another about the house and garden to see what the other was doing and interfere. Having been assured by their hostess that their melancholy condition was interesting, they saw no reason to efface themselves. Lady Waters, to relax, as she said, the strain of propinquity, had put them in two different bedrooms, each side of a passage. But backwards and forwards between their two rooms, to the alternate discomfort of Emmeline and Tim Farquharson, the tide of battle had rolled far into last night. No sooner did one Bligh appear to compose itself than the other bounced in to renew the conflict; when the aggressor retreated the first Bligh, thinking of something really conclusive to say, would dart in pursuit with a furious patter of slippered feet. Gilbert, in spite of his placid exterior, showed as much zest as Gerda.

Lady Waters asked Gilbert to take tea to the chauffeur, who was, she feared, a little annoyed at being taken out on a Sunday. She overruled her servants as she overruled her
prot
é
g
é
s
, but having gained a point could be full of consideration. Gilbert went off with a cup and the best of the sandwiches; Gerda, thinking of something crushing to say, sprang up and went wobbling after him in her high-heeled sandals.

“They seem rather upset,” said Tim Farquharson looking after them.

“They’re unhappy,” said Lady Waters.

“Well, I don’t feel
too
happy, but somehow one couldn’t go on like
that
.”

“You’re not unhappy,” said Lady Waters: she looked at him keenly. “Not now: you are simply making some readjustments.”

“I don’t think it can suit me.”

“My dear Tim, life is a succession of readjustments.”

Tim, looking depressed, said he had no doubt she was right. Lady Waters observed the droop in his nice profile. A sort of dependence in Gerda’s tottering movements had made him nostalgic: there was something in having a woman come after one, even to quarrel.

“
I
should hate,” he said, “to inflict my moods on anyone.”

“But you have unusual reticence.”

“Still, it feels queer now to realise one’s moods are no one’s affair.”

“Emmeline noticed you were unhappy.”

“I’m afraid I rather bore her,” Tim said, stretching his feet out and looking gloomily at his socks.

“No, I don’t think so. But she has a very reserved manner.”

“I suppose reserved people do take things harder. I often wish I weren’t reserved.”

Lady Waters looked thoughtfully down the valley. “Feeling,” she said, “is ingrowing.”

At this point, unfortunately, the Blighs came back. Gerda said the custodian was still staring.

“My
dear
Gerda,” exclaimed her hostess, “if it upsets you so much we had better move up the valley. But I like the idea of bringing back life to this old place. Perhaps we are in the atrium.”

“What is an atrium?”

“A kind of lounge.”

Gerda thought of ashtrays and wicker chairs. “It must have been very cold,” she said.

“It was, very cold. You see, at home they were accustomed to build on the shady side of a hill, and the Romans were not adaptable.”

“Then they cannot have been good colonists.”

“Well, they were,” said Gilbert annoyingly, cutting the Genoa cake.

“Were they like Anglo-Indians?” asked Gerda, ignoring him.

“One cannot be certain,” said Lady Waters. Gilbert had opened his mouth to say Romans had central heating, but the discussion seemed to be closed. Lady Waters looked monumental, her scarf draped about her.

A brief silence hung over the party; Gerda sat sucking her green beads and brooding. Gilbert wondered why something at once consequential and dreamy about his hostess’s manner had reminded him of the Dormouse. “ ‘So they were,’” he said aloud suddenly. “ ‘Very ill.’” No one took any notice. Tim Farquharson, slowly digesting that brief little talk, began to think kindly of Emmeline. He thought she looked all the time like a girl at a party to whom one has not yet been introduced: from that point almost all girls had declined for him. He had noticed in time that Jane (who had been his fiancee) was likely to be self-centred; Jane’s very charming appearance had ceased to atone for her habit of interrupting or looking elsewhere when he began to tell her about himself. Emmeline was so far from interrupting that quite a long second ensued before she would reply. He wished she had come to the villa. He feared, however, that she might think this a rather too quick readjustment, what might even be called a rebound.

Conversations with Lady Waters left Tim always rather unsettled, with the feeling of having not quite come up to scratch, of having said either less than she had expected or more than it pleased her to hear. He felt like some homely piano, that after some chords idly struck by a practised executant has been shut again with a bang and a sad inward jangle of wires. He doubted if she were entirely good for him but dared not pursue this too far, as if it were not for her encouragement, he would have still been engaged to Jane. Her hold on his vanity was, however, inexorable; while her country house and her tea-table were accessible he must not consider himself his own… . As the opposite hill went bright gold and a chill stole up the valley Tim wished he had been married some years, without being engaged. Through a haze of regret for Jane he beheld Emmeline.

As that chill stole up the valley, and the woods with their gold outline, in which evening announced itself by a whisper, receded in darkness and mystery, Gerda slid closer to Gilbert to lean on his shoulder for natural warmth. The smoke of their cigarettes, wavering up, melted. The dead house, less than a plan in masonry, tightened its hold on the fancy, saying how brief is fancy, the living eye with its colours, the heart with its quickness to clothe an unknown hill. Here, where exiles had lived, to-day’s little party of exiles cast round in spirit, to find nothing… . Lady Waters said it had been a beautiful day, but they ought now to be going home.

Sir Robert and Emmeline, guilty and happy, played tennis a little, walked a short way and had tea out under the lime tree. The Vicar did drop in to tea, between children’s service and evensong: he said there had been three christenings.

Sir Robert congratulated the Vicar. “The village is getting on.”

“Yes,” said the Vicar with ascetic enthusiasm, “our weddings and christenings balance; the young couples do very well. And then there are always the growing families.”

Emmeline, leaning back in her long chair, looked up through the lime. She loved to be with Sir Robert and liked the Vicar. Looking back at the house she saw through the open windows rooms undiscovered in shadow, empty and kind. The departure of Lady Waters with her plaintive interesting party had reassured house and garden, in which a native conventional spirit crept out to inhabit the rooms and alleys, shaking away the decades with their mounting petulance like creases out of a full silk skirt. Lilac embowered the arbours where love had once sought seclusion or grief privacy. The whole garden, tilting down to the west, gave to the afternoon sunshine its smooth mown lawns and May borders.

Here Emmeline, step-child of her uneasy century, thought she would like to live. Here—as though waking in a house over an estuary to a presence, a dazzling reflection: the tide full in—she had woken happy. But already a vague expectation of Monday and Tuesday filled her; looking out from the shade of the lime already she saw the house with its white window-frames like some image of childhood, unaccountably dear but remote.

“—Emmeline agrees with me, don’t you, Emmeline?” Sir Robert was saying.

“Oh, yes.”

“Now do you indeed?” said the Vicar with interest, turning round in his chair.

“I…”

“
Emmeline
!” said Sir Robert, shaking his head.

“Limes have a soporific effect,” said the Vicar smiling. Words could not express how pleased he had been to find Lady Waters from home and, instead, this thin girl with the social passivity of an angel, pouring out tea with her left hand unsteadily, gracefully under the lime tree. Indeed, had he not heard what was unmistakably Lady Waters’ car hoot, as it never failed to hoot, at the lych gate while he was conducting service, the Vicar might not have looked in at all. He owed Lady Waters no duty: if she ever did go to church, she said, it would not be to high church: these play on emotion.

“Do you like lime tea?” Emmeline asked the Vicar. But Sir Robert, whose conscience was sensitive, said on the same breath: “You know, they will find that villa shut up. I said so three times, but they would not believe me: do you think I ought to have said so again?”

“You did what you could,” said the Vicar, who understood that Sir Robert blamed himself less for letting the others go than for being so happy without them. “No doubt they enjoyed the drive.”

“No,” said Sir Robert, still worried, “they don’t care for motoring, they all said so. However, I daresay they’ll be as well there as anywhere else.”

The Vicar said: “Modern life becomes increasingly complex. It seems a short time since motoring was in itself a pleasure. As in fact, it is still to me; I never fall far short of that anticipation with which I first mounted my brother’s high red Minerva—of a type, Miss Summers, that you would not remember: it had a door at the back. I wore a dust coat and goggles; the ladies were heavily veiled. I am still surprised by the speed at which things fly past. But nowadays the whole incentive to motoring seems an anxiety to be elsewhere.”