Venus Over Lannery (22 page)

He wasn't ready for it. He winced, and flushed to the roots of his fair hair. “Well,” he said, “I ... er ... she . . .”

“I see,” said Mrs. Dryden thoughtfully; “it was Pauline. And that made you realise ...?”

“Yes,” he broke in eagerly, “what a fool I'd been. It opened my eyes.”

Mrs. Dryden shook her head sadly. “Not quite wide enough, I'm afraid, Norman.”

He frowned. “You mean ...?”

“This is what I mean. You found, you remember—and you were quite right—that you and Joan were unsuited to one another—that in marrying you'd made an unsuccessful experiment, and so you left her for Pauline. Now you find that you've made another unsuccessful experiment—that you and Pauline are unsuited. But to see in this a proof that, in some miraculous way, you and Joan have become suited ...”

“O, but I don't regard it as a proof; that, of course, would be absurd. What I meant when I said it had opened my eyes was that it had changed me. And it has, Mrs. Dryden. I've come to hate the kind of life I've been leading.”

Mrs. Dryden shrugged her shoulders. “Of course you have, my dear boy: it's a natural consequence of Pauline's having ... of you and Pauline having parted.”

Norman flushed and was about to reply when Mrs. Dryden went on. “Don't you think, even if we leave Joan out of the question altogether, that the moment when you're in a quite natural state of emotional reaction is a very bad time to begin yet another experiment?”

Norman frowned. “Experiment? You speak as if I were as cold-blooded as . . .”

“No, Norman,” Mrs. Dryden broke in. “I don't think you are cold-blooded, but I'm quite certain you're far too impulsive and thoughtless, and if you were to persuade Joan to break off proceedings and go back to you—which I assure you you won't succeed in doing—you would simply be using her for an even more precarious experiment; and that, believe me, Norman, would be the most monstrous selfishness on your part.”

He looked at her like a frustrated child. “But what am I to do?” he exclaimed in despair, never realising, until he saw it in Mrs. Dryden's coldly piercing grey eye, the inner significance of that too spontaneous outburst. Again he blushed to the roots of his hair, but Mrs. Dryden had the magnanimity, or perhaps the tactical skill, not to exploit his selfbetrayal. In her reply she took what he had said at its face value only.

“What are you to do? Are you asking my advice?”

He scowled like a petulant child. For the moment he was too angry at his humiliation to follow her lead. “No,” he said. “I wasn't asking for advice.” Then his face cleared and his lips curled to a charming, faintly roguish smile. “But if you
had
been advising me, what would you have said, Mrs. Dryden?”

She too smiled. She was, in fact, considerably disarmed. “What I should have said, Norman,” she
replied, serious, yet poking fun at him, “supposing you
had
asked my advice, would have been:' Engage a good cook-housekeeper to run your flat for you and don't marry for some years. I'm sure you'd be much happier. You're young and there's plenty of time.'”

He raised his eyebrows. “You think so?” he asked, really interested.

“I do indeed,” said Mrs. Dryden. “Why not try it?”

There was a sound of wheels on the gravel. Norman glanced at the window. “That will be my car,” he said. “I told the fellow to come back in time for the four-fifteen.”

He got out of his chair and Mrs. Dryden took and held the hand he offered. “Promise me,” she said, “that you won't bother Joan. This is rather an agitating time for her and you owe it to her not to add to her worries.”

He hung his head. “Now promise me,” she said, still holding his hand, “like a good boy.”

He raised his eyes. He was both touched and amused. “All right,” he said; “I will.”

She shook his hand, and as they went to the front door she added: “And promise me you'll think over the advice I would have given you if you had asked for it.”

He laughed. “O, of course I'll think it over.”

“And when this tiresome business is finished,” she said, “you must come and stay again.”

His face lit up. “That's awfully nice of you.” She opened the front door. “If Joan were to turn
up now,” she thought with some trepidation, “it would be a hideous piece of bad luck.” But there was no sign of Joan as she stood on the steps watching Norman get into the car. He waved his hand as the car drove away, and, when it had vanished round the bend in the drive, Mrs. Dryden turned back into the house. “Poor little wretch,” she said to herself; “he really is very charming.”

On a saturday afternoon—the last Saturday of October—Cynthia and Joan sat on a hillside above Lannery. Cynthia had arrived that morning and Eric and Frank were expected in time for tea. The short grass had been burnt to a pale gold by the heat of summer and the rainless autumn, and on the wide plain beneath them the stubble-fields lay spread like golden and ruddy carpets, among which the river curled itself lazily between its borders of pollard willows. Two days previously Joan's divorce, which she had been dreading for months, had come on. Edna had called for her at half-past ten and carried her off to the Law Courts, and, when they had arrived there, had asked questions and led her up stone stairs and down long passages with the most amazing efficiency. How would she ever have found her way and got through it all without Edna? In a long, upstairs passage, flanked with seats, they had met Mr. Rocket, her solicitor, and then had sat waiting for what had seemed hours. When the moment arrived and they stood up and were ushered into the court, her
nervousness had hardened to a cold self-possession. She was ready.

The court was rather like a pleasant lecture-room. They took their seats and her counsel made a speech in which she heard, to her surprise, a strange, detached history of her married life, and then she was told to go into the witness-box, and the judge, a charming old gentleman, had gently and politely asked her a few questions. Then Edna went into the box and, after her, some friend of Norman's whom she did not know. He had hardly got started, it seemed, when, to her surprise, everyone got up and hurried to the door, and Edna, who was sitting beside her, took her arm. “So much for that,” she said cheerfully; “let us go and have some lunch.”

“Is it finished?” Joan had asked.

“Of course it is!” Edna had replied. “Didn't you hear the judge say,' Decree nisi'?”

How extraordinary that an event which had entailed all those months of elaborate preparation and filled her with such misgiving should be so simple! The whole thing had lasted hardly ten minutes.

It was all over. There was nothing more to worry about. It had been wonderful to wake up yesterday morning and this morning and realise that the anxiety to which she had woken every day for all these months was gone. She was glad that she had made up her mind to it. She had no regrets. It was horrible to live with one you loved on the hopeless footing on which she had lived with Norman for so
long: it was much better to be free, even though freedom seemed empty and purposeless.

Cynthia spoke, and it seemed that she had been following Joan's unspoken thoughts. “Isn't it a blessing,” she said, “to feel that everything's over, that you're free to start afresh?”

“Yes, indeed!” said Joan. “It's wonderful to be done with all the anxiety and worry, but, as for starting afresh, that's another matter. I haven't an idea how or what I'm going to start. You're lucky, Cynthia; you have a job that fills your life, a job that you want to do and can do.”

“And you don't feel the same about being Mother's secretary?”

“I enjoy it enormously,” said Joan. “Who could help enjoying living with and working for Mrs. Dryden? But .. . I don't know . . .”

“You don't feel settled. But of course you don't: how could you? It's hard enough, in ordinary circumstances, to settle to a job that one hasn't chosen for the pure love of it. I hated my job at first, you know.”

Joan glanced at her in surprise. “But surely you chose it, Cynthia?”

“Yes, I chose it, but because I felt compelled to, not out of love for slums and slumming and dirty uneducated people. What started me off was simply ... well, a sense of justice, a social conscience. I was going to take up music: I was going to Berlin to study the piano. Not that I should have been good enough to be a professional, but that didn't matter.
I have five hundred a year of my own and Mother has three thousand, so there was no point in making money. But that was just the trouble. It seemed to me monstrous that I should have all that money through no effort of my own, while other people lived in dirt and dreariness and semi-starvation. For that plain and simple fact—whatever people may say about Capitalism and Socialism and Communism—there seems to me to be no justification at all.”

“Of course there isn't,” said Joan. “But what can one do? What could
I
do? I have just enough to live on—to live on, that is, in the class to which I belong—and no more. I don't see how we can alter it.”

“It's altering itself, fortunately; very slowly, of course; but still, conditions go on improving and freedom goes on spreading. I felt, like you, that I could do nothing, or almost nothing, to help in that. But there are other ways in which one can help. You know how Mother is always preaching about education. Her idea is that freedom and prosperity might turn out almost a disaster if people weren't capable of profiting by them and enjoying them when they get them. There are ten thousand things people need to be taught, if only one can teach them, and that was where I felt I might be able to do something. So I just plunged in, and how I hated it at first. Frank and Mother both say that you've got to begin with their minds and souls by giving them ideas and imagination and morality—a real morality,
of course, not a mere set of prohibitions. I didn't quite agree with them. I thought you had to begin with their stomachs—give them enough food and teach them cooking and the facts about food values.”

“What? Before ideas and morality?”

“Rather! There's no good sowing seeds if the soil's bad: they don't come up. It was with food that I started off when I began work in Frank's parish, but now we've got instructors who do it much better than I did, and we have child-welfare instruction as well; and nowadays—but you know what I do nowadays: give them concerts and talks about music, get up plays, run the lending library and take them down, a dozen at a time, for a whole day in the country once a fortnight. It all sounds very humdrum, no doubt, but we all enjoy ourselves enormously. Good heavens! If only I were a millionaire, I would move the whole parish, lock, stock and barrel, down here and turn the place into a village community with a church and theatre and concert-room, and kitchens and workshops, a herd of cattle and a vast fruit and vegetable farm and work and leisure for everybody.”

“I rather thought you were starting something of the sort already,” said Joan. “Mrs. Dryden was showing me yesterday the plans for the new hostel she's having built in the paddock.”

“Ah, Mother's told you about the hostel? It will hold fifteen people; and next summer, if it's ready, we shall have them down in relays for a week at a time.”

“And by then you and Frank will be married. How long have you known Frank, Cynthia?”

“Eight years. He had had an article in some weekly or other about religion or education or both—I don't remember—which Mother thought extremely good, and in her usual way she got in touch with him and asked him down here. Yes, it's eight years next month.” She laughed. “Not exactly a case of love at first sight, is it?”

“When I got engaged to Norman,” said Joan bitterly, “I'd known him just five months. We knew nothing of each other's real natures. We didn't even after we had married. Isn't it an awful thing, Cynthia, that people can fall in love before they know each other, and, even worse perhaps, that one can go on loving someone with whom one has almost nothing in common? I suppose you would say that isn't really love at all.”

“My dear, why should I say any such thing? But it's obvious that, the better one knows one's future husband, the more likely it is that one will be happy. You know, at least, what you're in for. If you fall in love first, you may find, I suppose, when it comes to making friends, that you can't, that there's no basis for friendship. But if you make friends first and then fall in love, well, there you are, safe and sound. I used to think, you know, that I would never fall in love. I never got in the least excited about strange young men as most of my friends did. When they came to me, all thrilled, and poured out confessions under seal of deadly secrecy, I had no
confession to offer in return and I used to look on their outpourings as so much sentimental nonsense.”

“So it was, probably,” said Joan grimly.

“Yes, probably it was. Still, I envied them secretly and I began to feel that there must be something wrong with me. Not that I was incapable of friendship. Frank and I were great friends. Our friendship was like a strong, healthy plant that went on putting out more and more leaves. I liked him more and more the better I knew him. How could I help it? Everyone does. And then, all of a sudden, the plant flowered.” She laughed—an amused, contented laugh. “I remember—and Mother remembers too; she reminded me of it the other day—that when he first came here I remarked to her what an ugly little man he was. So he is still, I suppose, but we soon became such friends that I ceased to notice it; and then I began to discover how extraordinarily expressive his face was. Now, I don't mind telling you, Joan, he seems to me positively beautiful.”

Joan sighed. “I began by thinking Norman beautiful, and then his face changed: for me, anyhow, all the warmth and kindness faded out of it, till now”—she pressed her fingers over her eyes—“I try not to remember it.”