Venus Over Lannery (23 page)

“Think of another face instead, Joan,” said Cynthia.

Joan looked at her in surprise. “Another? Whose?”

Cynthia stood up. “If you don't know,” she said, “I won't tell you.”

After breakfast next morning, Frank and Cynthia set off for church. Mrs. Dryden, Joan and Eric walked with them to the end of the drive and then strolled back towards the house. At the foot of the steps Mrs. Dryden stopped. “I shall leave you two to your own devices,” she said. “I have some work to do that will last me till lunch-time. If you want to do a good deed, Joan, you will take Eric for a walk. These town-birds want exercise. To my mind, Cynthia and Frank would be much better off climbing Bouldon Hill than sitting in that badly ventilated church. However . . .”

She turned away and went up the steps. The young people looked enquiringly at each other. “I'd love a walk,” said Eric, “if you would.”

“Yes,” said Joan, “let's go. But I must put on some thicker shoes.”

She ran up the steps and disappeared into the house, while Eric stood admiring the scarlet leaves of the Virginia creeper that climbed over the porch to the upper windows, and wondering whether his aunt had sent them off for a walk together designedly
or with no other notion than giving them an occupation. As he stood waiting, an upper window opened and she looked out. “Hallo, are you going, you two?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, “I'm waiting for Joan to put on some shoes.”

She nodded, smiled, and closed the window. Ah, it was a put up job, then! What a wonderful old thing she was, keeping an eye on people like a beneficent providence, giving them a rap over the knuckles or an encouraging push, making silent judgments, silent plans for their good. In a few moments Joan came out and they set off together.

They had had several walks together since Joan had been living at Lannery and they had reached that easy state of companionship in which silence is no embarrassment. In the days before she had become engaged to Norman, Joan had felt ill at ease with Eric. She had felt an urgency in him that bothered and oppressed her. With others he had seemed restrained, almost unresponsive, and she had wished that he would be more like that with her. If only he would leave her free, give her time. She liked him immensely, but she couldn't respond to those brown, darkly searching eyes of his, nor to the eager attention he focused on her. If he had been articulate, if he had expressed what he felt for her in words, it would have been easier for her, perhaps, to understand her own feelings and for each of them to understand the other. But he didn't speak; he was too shy
perhaps; and then Norman had come on the scene, so charming, so lively, and so easy to get on with. There was nothing oppressive or urgent about him, and nothing inarticulate. He talked amusingly, flattered her airily and yet, it seemed, sincerely, purveyed his irresistible charm with perfect urbanity. He had made secret fun of Eric, always referring to him as “your painstaking admirer” or “your laborious swain,” and she had found it impossible not to laugh. What a relief he had been after poor Eric! And yet, she confessed to herself now, what an empty, shallow creature he really was, compared with Eric. Since she had come to live at Lannery she had become really fond of Eric. He seemed to have matured and grown up. He was no longer the intense, awkward, inarticulate boy, but a goodtempered, warm-hearted, friendly fellow with still some traces of a shyness which made his friendliness the more attractive. She had always been glad when she heard he was coming down for the week-end, and twice he had asked her to lunch with him when she went up to London to see her solicitor.

But now, as he and she made their way along the field-path that skirted the river, she felt less at her ease than usual. She had been pondering on what Cynthia had said yesterday: “Think of someone else's face, Joan.” And, when she had pretended not to understand whom she had meant, Cynthia had retorted: “O, if you don't know, I won't tell you.” What had Cynthia meant exactly? Was she simply expressing her own idea that she and Eric ought to
marry, or was she hinting to her that Eric was still in love with her? How childish to pretend she didn't understand! Couldn't she have replied: “You mean Eric?” and given Cynthia a chance of continuing? No! Her instinct had been right. It was something other than childishness that had prevented her. It would have been outrageous to discuss it. It would have been like forcing open a rosebud, as she had sometimes done when she was a child, before it was ready to bloom. It must be left alone to blossom in its own time. Cynthia too knew that: that was why she had said no more.

They were crossing the footbridge that spanned the river and they stopped to lean over the rail and watch the long weed, like dark-green hair, waving idly in the unhurrying flow of the water.

“When will you be going up to London again?” Eric asked her.

“I don't know,” she said. “Probably not for a long time. Mrs. Dryden has asked me to go on being her secretary. I wish I knew if I was being really useful to her or if she has asked me only out of kind–ness. What do you think, Eric?”

“Do you have much work to do?” he asked.

“O, lots! There are lots and lots of letters to be typed and filed, and extracts to be made from books and reports.”

“Well, isn't that proof enough?”

“It would be, if it wasn't for the fact that she had no secretary before. Don't you think that means that she doesn't really require one?”

“But I thought it was all settled that you should stay here till . . .”

“Till the case was finished. But now that it is finished ...”

“Finished?” he said. “You mean . . .?”

“Haven't you heard that it came on last Thursday?”

He stared at her in astonishment. “Good heavens, no! I've heard nothing. And it went through all right, of course?”

“Yes, there's nothing now but to wait for it to be made absolute.”

“You've nothing more to worry about? I am glad, Joan. You've been having a wretched time of it, I know. What a blessed relief!”

“That's why I feel doubtful as to whether I ought to let Mrs. Dryden keep me here any longer.”

“O, but of course you must,” he replied resolutely. “You seem very certain all of a sudden,” she said.

Eric laughed. His certainty arose, not at all from any decision about the question she had asked, but from the realisation that she was free, or almost free, and that if she were to leave Lannery he might lose sight of her. Yes, she must be made to stay at Lannery a little longer, even if he had to go to his aunt and confide in her. He felt that a crisis had caught him unawares. What was he to do? He mustn't let her slip away from him again, and yet he couldn't ask her now to marry him, that would be not only tactless but rash. For all he knew, her
feelings were still involved with Norman. He hadn't once ventured, during all these months, to talk to her either of Norman or the divorce; he had left it to her to raise the subject and she had never done so. But would it be possible to ask her if she thought that, some day . . .?

“You like being Aunt Emily's secretary, don't you?” he asked.

“I should think I do,” she said. “She makes you feel so marvellously alive. And I enjoy the work. I should enjoy it even if it was nothing more than the job of typing and filing. I love the routine and the drudgery of it. But it's not only that. You see, she tells me of all her schemes and ideas and it's extremely interesting. The days fly past with incredible speed; it seems as if we'd no sooner got started on Monday than the week's over and Cynthia and you, sometimes, are coming down for the week-end. When I think of the life I led in London, bottled up inside myself...”

She had turned away, then, from her life with Norman? Was that a sign in his favour, he wondered, or did it mean that she had turned away from married life altogether? “You think,” he asked, “that everyone ought to have a job?”

“Yes,” she said, “I do. Leisure is no good to anybody, at least not to us of to-day. Our grandmothers may have liked it, but I don't believe they did. I believe they sat and ate their hearts out and grew old from lack of anything else to do. Doesn't it seem to you awful to live as I lived in London,
with two servants to do all the work, two servants to work for two people, one of whom had nothing whatever to do but give a few orders and do a little shopping?”

“But still,” he said lamely, “there are people who are not married and have a job and yet aren't happy.”

“Like Daphne,” said Joan. “Of course there are—thousands; but did I say there weren't?”

“No, perhaps you didn't. But I rather thought you suggested that marriage and idleness made people unhappy.”

“I'm sure I didn't,” she said; “or, if I did, I certainly didn't mean to. What I meant was that having nothing to do is almost sure to make us unhappy.”

“O, I agree with that,” said Eric; but he was thinking of Daphne. Joan's mention of her name had startled him. He had shot a shamefaced glance at her, but he had seen at once that her remark was quite guileless. But now his thoughts began to run on that strange affair with Daphne which had already faded from his mind so rapidly that it seemed little more than a dream. He could almost have believed that it had never happened. None the less he must tell Joan about it before he asked her to marry him. That was quite clear in his mind, so clear that he did not have to find reasons for or against it. But he would have not only to tell her but to try to make her understand.

They were climbing the slope of Bouldon Hill and,
half-way up, they turned to look back. The country had dropped away beneath them; the little white bridge which they had crossed only a few minutes ago had already shrunk to the size of a child's toy. On their left, larch-trees shot high above their heads in hanging showers of yellow like the golden rain of a firework display, and, on the bare slope to their right, rust-brown bracken and scarlet-stemmed willow-herb rose waist-high. A felled tree lay at the edge of the path and he suggested that they should sit down. He had made up his mind to force himself to tell her at once about the Daphne affair, and he plunged in, headlong, without preparation. “There's something I want to tell you,” he began, “something I want you to know, that happened only a few months ago. You know, don't you, that when you became engaged to Norman I was hoping that ... that you . . .”

“Yes, Eric,” she said; “I know.”

“Well, after that,” he said, “after you were married, I felt rather bored with life of course. I felt, as you were saying just now, bottled up inside myself. And then one day I met a girl I knew whom I hadn't seen for some time. She had been in the same sort of state as I, when we met. She had had a row with a man she was in love with. We had tea together. She seemed to me awfully nice and amusing and we chattered away like anything, as if we had both woken up for the first time for months. We arranged to meet again, and after that we spent a lot of time together. You've no idea what a relief it was to shake
off the months and months of gloom and become all cheerful and irresponsible. It was just what I wanted and I fell in love with her. There are different ways of falling in love, you know, Joan,” he said solemnly.

“I know that,” she said.

“You do?” He seemed surprised that she should understand that. “But can you believe that one can fall in love quite frivolously, almost force oneself to fall in love for the mere fun of the thing? Not that I felt exactly that it was frivolous, but I knew perfectly well that I didn't want to marry her. But I thought it would be very nice to have a sort of lighthearted affair.”

“And was she in love with you?” Joan asked.

“She said she wasn't and behaved as if she was. When I took her at her word and told her I would put it out of my mind, she was quite annoyed and called me a turncoat and told me she had been beginning to ... to respond. She was determined not to let me escape, and at last, when we were staying with some friends, I looked out of my bedroom door one night and saw she had left hers ajar. She was waiting for me. She admitted it afterwards.” He broke off. “Does all this sound very . . .? Can you imagine yourself being really in love and then, when you had been disappointed, going off in a reckless, cheerful way with someone else?”

She considered the question. “No,” she said, “I can't imagine doing it myself.”

“You think it's an awful thing to do?”

“No,” she said; “I can see ... I'm ready to ...”
She broke off and faced him frankly. “Why should I pretend to you that I understand when I don't? You see, Eric, I'm fairly ignorant about such things. But what I do feel is that, if it was very awful, you wouldn't have done it.”

“You really think that, Joan?”

“Certainly I do,” she said. “But what happened then?”

“An unforeseen thing happened. She told me she was going to have a child.”

She met his eyes again. “What did you feel about that?”

“I felt thrilled about the child: I don't see how you could help it. But I felt caught, too; because I decided at once that we must get married and I didn't want to marry her.”

“And you asked her?”

“Yes, and she wouldn't have it at any price. She said she wasn't going to have the child and cursed me for letting her in for everything. From that moment she hated me like poison and gave me such an awful time of it that I actually got to hate her. It was horrible, because, you see, I couldn't just clear out and leave her. I had to see her through.”

“And did she have the child?”

“No!” he said.

“And do you still hate her, Eric?”

“No, that's gone. I haven't seen her since.”

“And if you were to meet her now?”

He gave a low, meditative laugh. “You know, I should find it almost impossible to believe that
anything had happened between us.” He stood up and stretched himself. “Do you think it very strange that I should have told you all this?” he asked. “I felt I had to, whatever you might think of it.”