Venus Over Lannery (20 page)

He read it through, considered it for a moment, and then rewrote it, omitting the second sentence.

Edna and Roger had finished their evening meal and were washing-up in the little kitchen, chatting happily as they did so. “By the way,” Roger said, “I forgot to tell you I met Cynthia on my way home and asked her to come round on Thursday evening.”

“Good!” said Edna. “But didn't you ask her to bring Frank?”

“No!” said Roger. “Frank's not a bad chap for a parson, but still he
is
a parson.”

“Well, and you're an engineer, aren't you? And I'm a doctor of sorts, and Mrs. Jebson's a char.”

“True!” said Roger with a laugh. “There's no denying it. But we're rational creatures as well.”

“So's Frank,” said Edna; “a good deal more so than most people.”

“O, come, Edna! Rational? What about resurrections and ascensions and trinities and virgin births? You're a doctor: have you ever assisted at a virgin birth?”

“Well, at least one of my patients, poor creature, tried to persuade me that I was going to.”

“But, when it came to the point, you didn't.”

“No! She gave it up before the child was born. Still, I don't see that these questions need prevent us from asking Frank to the flat.”

“I don't feel free with Frank,” said Roger testily. “It's like having a child among grown-up company: you can't say what you like.”

“Don't be silly,” said Edna. “You can say whatever you like in front of Frank. That's the best of him: there's no prudishness or priggishness about him. He may disagree with you and think you're wrong, but why shouldn't he? You often think he's wrong.”

“I
know
he's wrong,” said Roger stubbornly.

“Just so; and he knows you're wrong.”

“My dear Edna, that's nonsense. One of us must be right.”

Edna laughed a little impatiently. “Probably both of you are right. Why not put it that way?”

Roger spread out his hands in despair. “My dear child, you speak as if there were no such things as facts, as if it didn't matter a damn if you called black white or white black or both of them white or both of them black. You know perfectly well what I mean. Take those absurdities I mentioned, the Resurrection and all the rest of them... .”

“But have you ever, as a matter of fact, talked to Frank about them? I doubt very much if he would call them facts.”

“Then what would he call them?”

“Well, symbols, probably. He accepts them, I
suppose, as expressions of... But what's the good of my trying to justify his particular convictions? I can't, any more than I can justify your sublime faith in
x
and
y
and all sorts of incomprehensible formulæ.”

“That's a totally different matter—a matter of knowledge, not of faith. Our formulæ have practical results; our houses and bridges are facts. You can't disprove applied mathematics; it's a practical science.”

“No, I can't disprove it and I can't prove it either.”

“Simply because you haven't the brains.”

“Quite so; and I haven't the brains to prove or disprove Frank's convictions, and neither have you. But I have brains enough to understand that what has engrossed thousands of great minds for nearly twenty centuries can't be mere childish nonsense. I should be a fool if I didn't.”

“In other words, I'm a fool.”

“Yes,” said Edna angrily, “you are, in some ways—a great fool.”

“Thank you!” said Roger. They had finished the washing-up and, leaving a kettle to boil for the tea which they always had later in the evening, they went into the sitting-room and settled themselves in their usual chairs on either side of the fire. Roger took up the poker and began fiddling with the fire and an angry silence fell between them which became every moment more and more embarrassing.

“What about your Beethoven symphonies?” asked Edna more quietly, in a desperate attempt to
break the silence. “Can you prove or disprove them?”

“There you go again,” said Roger. “There's no question of proof or disproof in such a case. It doesn't apply. But you can make out a logical specification of a Beethoven symphony just as you can of a cantilever bridge, which is more than you can do,” he added vengefully, “for most of the maundering stuff of your Strausses and Scriabines.”

“And a lot of good your specifications would do you,” sneered Edna. “I should have thought you had enough of them at the office, and more than enough of your dreary logic both in and out of the office. You go round and round in your little wire cage like a performing squirrel and do your best to believe that there's nothing outside it.”

“Well, anyhow, it's better to have a decent, coherent cage than to flounder about like . . .”

“Like what?” asked Edna scornfully.

“Like an aimless, brainless thing at the mercy of every current.”

“Well,” said Edna, “please don't expect me to share your cage with you.”

Roger sniffed contemptuously. “You couldn't, even if you wanted to.”

He got out of his chair and went angrily to the kitchen to make the tea.

Edna leaned back in her chair. She felt sore, physically sore inside, as if she had swallowed some scalding liquid. What had started it all? She couldn't remember. They had been so happy together over
their meal, and all of a sudden it had boiled up out of nothing. Why had she let herself be drawn in? Last time they had had one of these wretched quarrels she had made a vow to control herself in future. Not that she had started it, at least she wasn't conscious of having started it. She had suddenly found herself involved. Perhaps it was the same with Roger. He didn't really want to quarrel either, she was sure. Well, whichever of them was to blame, the quarrel would never start if only she could remember in time not to argue. The thought of all the wounding things she had said to him hurt her horribly, much more than what he had said to her. No, she would never quarrel again: it was too painful for both of them. Perhaps it came of her determination to stand up for herself and not to let Roger dictate to her. She considered the idea. No, it wasn't that. She hadn't been standing up for herself; on the contrary, she felt much more as if she had knocked herself down. Well, she wouldn't argue any more and she wouldn't stand up for herself either. She wouldn't ever again do anything that would hurt him, and so hurt herself. She recalled his face when she had refused to go for a walk with him at Lannery, and her heart ached.

From the kitchen came the clink of cups and spoons. He was setting the tray. In spite of their wretched quarrel he was getting the tea for them both as he had always done since they had married. She got out of her chair and went to the kitchen. He was standing beside the table, with his hands in
his pockets, his face fixed and empty as a mask. She went up to him, put her arm round him and laid her cheek on his shoulder.

“Roger,” she said, “I'm terribly sorry.”

He took one hand out of his pocket and patted her back. “It wasn't your fault,” he said.

“I don't know whose fault it was,” said Edna, “but I said a lot of beastly things I didn't mean.”

“We both let fly,” he said. “We both lost our tempers.”

“What was it started us off?”

“It was Frank Todd.”

Edna laughed softly. “Poor Frank, of all people! Well, we won't quarrel any more about Frank, Roger. If you don't want to have Frank here, we won't have him. Look at the kettle! It's boiling like fury.”

Roger went to the stove and Edna carried the tray into the sitting-room, and in a moment he followed her with the teapot and hot-water jug.

“I'll tell you something,” she said as she poured out the tea. “You remember when I refused to go for a walk with you at Lannery? Well, I would really have been quite glad to go. I refused because I was angry with you. You remember I had refused earlier, before we went down to breakfast, and, when you asked me again in front of Joan and Mrs. Dryden, I thought you were reckoning on my not liking to refuse when they were there.” She leaned forward and looked him in the face, smiling. “Now, were you, Roger?”

He smiled back a little sheepishly. “Yes,” he said, “I believe I was.”

“But that was extremely naughty of you,” she said.

“But why did you refuse the first time?”

“The first time, you didn't ask me; you merely asserted that we would go for a walk. I was keeping my end up, as I told Mrs. Dryden afterwards.”

“You and Mrs. Dryden discussed it, then?”

“She told me, when you had gone, that I was treating you badly. I confessed that I had refused on principle, and to that she replied in her delightful, unexpected way: ‘Edna, beware of acting on principle.'”

Roger burst out laughing. “Good for her!” he said.

“And good for me,” said Edna. “And good for you, Roger. You often bring principles to bear on me, you know.”

“Do I?” he said innocently.

“Certainly you do. I told Mrs. Dryden that you were sometimes so dictatorial that I'd come to feel that I must stand up for myself, and she said that of course you were dictatorial, because I had brought you up to be so, that I'd started off as an obedient child quite ready to do everything you told me to do and think what you told me to think, and that I had then suddenly grown up and started a mind and a will of my own, and that, she said, must be very bewildering to you. She said you probably hadn't the slightest idea of what was occurring. Now tell
me, Roger, what you've been thinking for the last year or so.”

“I've been thinking,” he said, flushing a little as he spoke, “that we weren't getting along nearly as happily as we used to do and that our life seemed to be ... well... going wrong somehow.”

“But you didn't know why?”

“I was afraid,” he said shyly, “that you weren't quite as keen on me as you used to be.”

Edna's eyes filled with tears. She reached out her hand and laid it on his. “You're a much nicer creature than I am, my dear,” she said, “and I won't forget it. And you must try not to forget that I really have grown up in the last year and a half. You must let me have my way sometimes, just as I used always to let you have yours.”

“And allow you to enjoy your Chopin undisturbed?”

“O, damn Chopin!” said Edna cheerfully.

“Don't you think,” said Roger, “that perhaps Chopin has become, in Mrs. Dryden's sense of the word, a principle with both of us? I don't really dislike all of him, you know.”

Edna stared at him in astonishment. “You don't, Roger? Do you mean to say that all this time .. .?”

“There it is, you see!” he said, grinning. “A matter of principle! But what about you? Surely you don't like all of him?”

“O dear me, no!” said Edna. “I can't stand the more sentimental of the nocturnes, and there are
several other things—some of the preludes, a good many of the valses... .”

“And, on the other hand, there's that sonata with the really gorgeous opening, and parts of the fantasie, and a study, I forget which, a really fine thing quite in the classical style. But—well, it's quite true—Chopin was, on the whole, against my principles, and still is: my
real
principles, I mean.”

“Just as Frank is against your principles?”

“O, Frank! Actually, as you know, I quite like Frank. I said much more against him just now than I really feel. You set me off somehow or other and it was really you, I believe, that I was getting at. No, Frank's all right. I'll ring him up and ask him to come with Cynthia on Thursday.”

“Roger,” said Edna later, as they were going to bed, “do you think we shall ever quarrel again?”

“Probably!” he said with a smile. “But it won't much matter now, will it? We shall know that everything's really all right.”

Having read Eric's reply to her letter, Daphne crumpled it up and threw it into the fire. So much for Eric: that was all the thanks she got for being generous to him. He was just the same as all the rest. Still, what did it matter? She had never really cared for him. The whole incident had been a miserable mistake, as she had known from the beginning that it would be. If Roy hadn't let her down so brutally it would never have happened. It was only because she was so miserable about Roy that she had allowed Eric to persuade her; and Eric, of course, had known that. He had seen that she was desperate, and had taken advantage of it. He was just a selfish little beast, out for his own satisfaction. Well, he had had his punishment, that was one comfort. She was sorry, now, that she had written him that friendly letter. He didn't deserve it. But why bother about that? Eric was a back number: the incident was closed, thank heaven, and she was free from him. What a relief it had been to escape from that haunting fear. She and Juliet had given a little cocktailparty, “to celebrate my deliverance, Ju—deliverance as opposed to delivery,” as she had wittily put it,
and Juliet, of course, had been shocked at the joke.

But, now that the distraction provided by Eric was at an end, her thoughts turned back to Roy. At the end of their last terrible quarrel months ago he had told her that he would have nothing more to do with her and that if she made any attempt to see him again he would leave England for good and all. He wouldn't do that, she was sure: he was far too absorbed in his precious career: but his threat had alarmed her vaguely and she had kept away from him. But now, once more, she had far too much time to herself. Work was slack: she had not enough to fill in the time during which Juliet was out, and, as before a good deal of Juliet's spare time was taken up by Bill. What a strange couple they were! They seemed perfectly content to carry on their funny little humdrum affair week by week and month by month. In the end, no doubt, they would marry and become more humdrum than ever. Well, that was what it was to be free from strong feelings: they hadn't an ounce of real passion between them. How different from her own tragic, passionate nature! What ages it was since she had seen Roy. When she tried to picture him now, no picture would come. It was easy enough to picture Cynthia, or Frank Todd, or that little idiot Eric: she could call them up and visualise them almost as clearly as if she were watching them through a window. But Roy, the only one she wanted to see, refused to appear. Once more she began to brood over him and crave for him, and as spring turned to summer, and summer, lonely and
uneventful, changed to autumn, she forgot her grievances and her hatred of him and was possessed only by the irresistible longing to see him and be with him again. At last she could bear it no longer and determined that she must get in touch with him. She would write to him: to go and see him would only make him angry and be worse than useless. And so, after long thought, she sat down one evening when Juliet was out and wrote.