Friends and Relations Read online

  From Laurel there would be always the same cry, in despair, in wild resolution: “Save them for me!” While her house fell like Usher’s cracked through the heart, through the hearth; with where there had been fires the stare of a cold unsuspected moon: “Oh, save them!”—honesty, nonsense, wit, all the dear conventions, happy custom.

  When Lewis came in, Theodora was in his rooms. “So—?” she said, preparing to be intolerable. They were both truculent. “Well?” said Lewis. She had been there some time; he tipped a fuming ash-tray into the grate and brushed some ash from his table.

  “Well what?” countered Theodora. “As you weren’t answering your telephone I came round,” she added.

  “So I see.”

  “What ought we to do?”

  “I see no reason why we should do anything.”

  “What about Rodney?”

  “For God’s sake leave Rodney alone,” said Lewis, violently.

  There was a quite remarkable drop in her manner. “So they have gone, really?” she said. For the first time, she had bluffed without pleasure. “What a fool you are, Lewis,” she added drearily, “how on earth could you think I knew? It was pure speculation—nightmare. They told me Janet had gone—we were to have lunched this morning; I rang her up. Then I tried to get Laurel; when she heard me she fled and sent Anna to do the idiot child. And no one ever knew you be out at this hour!—Don’t make faces, Lewis!—Of course,” she went on, unpleasantly, “we know this is hard on you. So much to be arranged, so much popping in and out, such tact—”

  “Whereas you enjoy this kind of thing.”

  “Naturally,” said Theodora. Dramatic in her sincere misery, she stood biting her lip like a stage villain.

  “Of course, they’ll turn up again.”

  “In which case it will be all right,” said Theodora.

  “Really, we can’t go into that—A drink, Theodora?”

  “No thank you, Lewis.”

  “Then perhaps if you don’t mind—”

  “Oh hell! oh hell!” said Theodora, rhetorical.

  “Yes, I know. But you really must go if you’re going to have hysterics.”

  “I can’t stand this; I love her! I tell you, idiot, I love her beyond propriety—”

  Lewis wondered how he and Theodora had come to know each other so long without bloodshed. “Yes, it is most upsetting,” he said icily. “And never, never think of anyone but yourself. It would be fatal, wouldn’t it, Theodora? I should go home and lie down.”

  She really was unhappy. And what a good thing, thought Lewis, viewing the entire collapse of any charm she ever had, that she was not unhappy more often. “I suppose,” he thought, “they do really suffer.” She was so entirely to pieces that Lewis—by picking up again and handing to her her gloves and her cigarette-case as fast as she put them down again—had no difficulty in edging her from the flat.

  “The fact is,” he admitted, taking a last shocked look at her through the bars of the lift, “Theodora’s jealous—And don’t talk!” he shouted, as she began to descend. “And don’t bother Laurel.” He caught a last black look at his feet as her face passed them. She was furious, too. Such a moment for anger—impure, selfish fire. What had brought her round? Had their going scribbled itself across the sky of London? So savage rumour creeps through the forest, faster than any runner. Shaken, Lewis poured himself out a drink, though it was still so early. Yes, they were less than twelve hours upon their way.

  Was this as Lady Elfrida expected? Her due, he thought vaguely.

  He drank without pleasure, leaning against the mantelpiece. What had stung him to the personal quick? Was he chagrined, or perhaps humiliated? Were those two by now out at sea, past the buoys, on an ocean to unhappy knowledge not trackless but scored bewilderingly? Land-bound, he hated their damned ship, all damned ships, and hated those everlasting departures. “We all seemed to be getting along so nicely,” thought Lewis.

  Watching a ship draw out you are aboard a moment, seeing with those eyes: eyes that you can no longer perceive. You see the shore recessive, withdrawing itself from you; the familiar town; the docks with yourself standing; figures—but later (where was the crowd?) all gone. The high harbour crane is dwarfed by spires behind; there are buildings very distinct, paste-board houses: you can still count the windows. Indifferently, you perceive some unknown relation, the hill right over the church—lovely, the light church backed by the dark hill: you often went in without looking up. The opera house and the station are brothers, with twin arcades. The steep avenue to the observatory you never mounted—now the whole town is ruled by that grave bubble. The climbing terraces are in order, lending each other grace. You look—as this all retreats—with regret but without desire. The figures in trouble are inconceivable, gone. Your tear perhaps is for some fine house with a portico, unknown, always to be unknown.

  —So you looked back with those aboard, for a moment only. So they depart; traitors to you, with you, in the senses. The ship, those eyes, are for you ashore now inconceivable, gone. Under the very high crane a winch creaks, clocks strike from the dwarfed spires behind. The church hides the hill, terrace blocks out terrace. The crowd that you are breaks up, looks out no longer, recognizes futility. You all stand apart but still return to the town two and three abreast in a kind of familiarity. There is some awkward gesture, a word or two between strangers, a handkerchief put away. But now, you all part; the ship is forgotten. So you relinquish the travellers, the ship vanishes. That last exchange, that identity of a moment, has taken everything; you have lost even regret. The close town receives you in its confusion.

  Lewis put down his empty glass on the mantelpiece, resolving to see Laurel. She must not stay there alone. Besides, there must be something that she should do. Plans to make, possibly; or perhaps she should write letters.

  7

  Lady Elfrida did not leave a caretaker at Trevor Square. Nothing there would lock—she had few keys, actually: she mistrusted a caretaker’s ennui and did not like to think of one roving about her house. So she left one latch-key with Edward, in case she wanted anything sent after her—he carried the key on his ring, with others—and arranged for a Mrs. Thomson, her charwoman, to look in daily, open windows, dust if she cared, forward letters and report if anybody had broken in. For some weeks Mrs. Thomson’s visits were uneventful, but this Wednesday she had “quite a turn.” Drawing up the drawing-room blinds, she discovered Mr. Edward Tilney asleep on the sofa. The poor young gentleman—for so he still appeared—had taken off his shoes, pulled back the dust-sheet and now lay sound asleep with an air of great discomfort and restlessness, like a traveller who did not expect to sleep at all. Mrs. Thomson screamed. He, opening his eyes without a sound, looked fixedly, calmly at her as though she were quite in order. He could not be himself at all. But he explained, as pleasantly as you could wish, that he had lost his own key, got locked out of his own house, and recollecting that he carried the key of his mother’s, turned in here for the night. He hoped he had not alarmed Mrs. Thomson? Mrs. Thomson confessed that he had alarmed her and said she was only glad he had not been taken up. The constable on the beat was giving an eye to the house, she said. Edward told her he had avoided the constable. “I should make a good burglar,” he added pleasantly. He sat up on the sofa rubbing his chin with a finger, looked with an odd air of recollection about the dismantled drawing-room and asked what time it was. She was pleased to tell him it was eleven o’clock—she expected there might be trouble somewhere for Mr. Tilney. His poor young lady! However, he did not smell of drink—on this point it would have been impossible to deceive Mrs. Thomson. He shut his eyes again for a moment, then got up and put on his shoes. She offered him a cup of tea; he said he felt more like a shave and a clean collar; he must go out for both. Mrs. Thomson, who had sons of her own, was sorry later she had not insisted on that cup of tea. From the balcony window, she saw him stop d
ead, oddly, half-way down Trevor Square.

  He stopped dead, in the sun by the palings, but finding he could not think was alarmed and went on downhill, quickly, towards Harrod’s. Harrod’s should have a collar; would they also shave him? Laurel lay lightly on the surface of his mind, a skeleton leaf too frail to disturb water. His silence, his cruelty to her were transparencies, casting no shadow. Morning, Knightsbridge, the brown dome of Harrod’s, Mrs. Thomson’s surprise: all weighed a little but nothing appeared extraordinary. He could never bear Laurel to be even a little troubled; now, supposing her desperate, he knew himself unchanged. There was no longer any impossible. He supposed he must now be delivered from something, free: this term with no bounds, incapable of appreciation, of measurement, spun in his head as he approached Brompton Road for his collar. He felt familiar with himself, heard his own step, looked down at his shadow.

  This shadow of his on aching July pavements (for he was still very tired) he would not see now for long. They would be in France—he jumped the narrow but very deep interval to the week’s end—in Brittany. He carried the tickets with him—here they were, all the time. On Saturday the Tilneys would shut up their London house and make their cheerful departure.

  A query—the scarlet telephone-box ahead—made him contract. Telephone? He looked through the scarlet lattice: empty: the directory dangled. Telephone? He asked himself what any other man would have said to Laurel. But there was no other man. “I could not come back to you. If I could have told you I could not, I could have come.” Quickening his pace, he passed the telephone; to pause farther down at a corner. Brompton Road roared, very close. As though his cruelty to her were something he had knowingly executed but not knowingly designed, something composed phrase by phrase, carved detail by detail or minutely painted standing close to the canvas, he had to stand back from it now with a new-comer’s awe at its largeness, its ignorant boldness, its realization of some giant and foreign self in him.

  The slow white passage east of some clouds, a stir here and there in a high-up awning, suggested, above and round London, some warm disturbing wind. He supposed that at Batts, where Janet was now at home, wind would set up in that house built for calm-frosted mornings when trees were like images on the window-pane, immovable mists from the lake, the heaviness of late summer—some unrest, a strangeness to its own nature or, between the intermittent movement of curtains and shadows, a kind of tension. Or could she sleep through today? The dear monotony of her life, rising, covered what was to him her drowning face. Oblivion of her, of her whole look and her last look, had established itself in sleep with him; become, if he were indeed entombed, entombed here with him; become the intimate of his spirit. Became his very spirit itself that travelled about his cloudy idea of her form like a blind hand, without regret or desire. If he was to see her again he would see her familiarly downcast, looking nowhere, preoccupied. Her absences, her silences, her abstentions were now again informed by the only sense he had of her. If indeed between today and yesterday they had met, they had met unwilling; or else, too willing, had not met. Or perhaps last night after the whole day’s feverish half-obscurity, the obscurity of the years, they had for the first time, enlightened, parted.

  He thought of his wife. Dismissing her nearness to him in the spaceless present, the agonizing tension between them now of a silent telephone-wire, he saw her in flickering little sequences of their intimacy; Laurel putting all the Dresden china away—Oh, she cried, how had they ever lived with it!—trying on inscrutability, spinning a cushion to him across the floor, patting cream on her face from the chin up.

  * * *

  —

  “I knew there would be a message,” she said to Lewis excitedly. “I knew there had been some mistake! But thank you, Lewis, thank you so much! But I wish now we had never—”

  She would have liked to offer Lewis lunch, but would have liked far better to see him go. Besides, there would be no lunch; she had not ordered any. There he still stood in the hall, looking at her askance: something must still be owing. It was half-past twelve; Edward’s telegram had just now been delivered. Sandwiches—as though he had helped her put out a fire, as though they were moving house? She had not quite the heart for this. Dear Lewis—but how imperceptive he was! Would he never leave her?

  Anna was there in the hall with them, quite the grown girl, her arm through her mother’s; very much present. Laurel could read in Lewis’s manner—in so far as, having hardly assembled himself, he had a manner at all—that he thought it a pity Anna was not brought up like Hermione. He would have liked to ask her to run away. Laurel of course wished strongly to reassert the normal, but it would not be normal to ask Anna to run away. This was not Batts, Laurel was not Janet; there was nowhere for Anna to run to.

  “All the same, I don’t think so,” said Lewis, after an interval.

  “Don’t think what?”

  “That we’ve made any unnecessary fuss.”

  “Oh, all right, Lewis—Don’t let’s all stand in the hall.”

  Of course, too many people were always present: at this very moment she heard Sylvia beginning to come cautiously up the basement stairs. “I’m so thankful,” Laurel said, “that Elfrida’s in Ireland.”

  “I don’t see—” began Anna. This child who, having suddenly reinherited her whole life as Edward’s daughter, stared so knowingly from beside Laurel’s shoulder, certainly did antagonize Lewis. And someone ought to do something at once about Theodora, somebody ought to stop her…“You were mad,” they ought to tell Theodora: one ought to bully her. Lewis and Theodora must meet forthwith. For her mind, with his own, was now the sole but still direful theatre of this large non-occurrence. Janet was home, asleep—Rodney had telephoned—Edward would soon be returning. The ship had not sailed, the aloe had not flowered.

  “I don’t see,” said Anna, “how he had breakfast at Trevor Square?”

  “Let’s go up to the drawing-room.”

  “No—Look here, Laurel; I must be going.”

  “Do stay, do have lunch!”

  * * *

  —

  Laurel’s bravado had reached a climax. She was quite wild; she had courage to waste, more now than she needed; she was quite overtopping the dreadful day. She laughed, was too natural, gaily manacled Anna’s wrist as the child pulled away. For the child, overlooked, was once more furious with suspicion. They all knew her father had not breakfasted: something was still the matter; she was not being fairly used.

  “You don’t seem very glad!” she cried, and had to be appeased by them both—was she only Anna? She would feed on this morning, making her strong young growth, like a tree, from the very thought of ruin. But no; she knew nothing, they could be quite certain; she could guess at nothing of what had not occurred. Lewis and Laurel could not do enough to propitiate the little girl. She should go to the pictures without Simon: she should be given a parasol to take to France.

  Lewis said he must really go. Laurel said good-bye at the foot of the stairs and was half-way up—so much of the day still claimed her—before he had opened the hall door. Then she turned anxiously, pushed past Anna, ran down to catch him. She said something rapidly about France, their departure, their holiday; good-bye now for some weeks, perhaps? “So, Lewis…” She stopped, so urgently: that was all. He let himself out (there she still stood) and, shutting the hall door heavily, excluded himself and the street where on trees and railings a cloud moving east shed a bright, transient shadow. He had heard what she had not attempted to say: “So please, forget…”

  * * *

  —

  That evening, Laurel comforted Edward. Not enough could be done to that end; he had suffered through her; she had had no idea of her power. He was so tired—how far had he walked? He guessed at some streets and squares and remembered the empty curve of Regent Street. Night had been cruel to him, so undefended; she could not bear to think of him
homeless that whole hard night. “If I could have been with you—I could have been anybody; I need not have been me.”

  “But I did sleep, you know.”

  “On Elfrida’s sofa? It’s so short.”

  “The beds were all covered with newspaper; I touched one and it crackled. Besides, I found I didn’t want to stay upstairs. You know that’s always been like a strange house. All her things were about, not put away. I don’t think she cares for them much, do you? She hardly lives there; this time she seemed to be gone for good. So I stayed in the drawing-room.”

  “—The telephone’s there—” But ashamed, she had hidden her face on his arm.

  “I know; I looked at it.”

  “I didn’t mean to say that! Forgive me, I never—don’t, don’t, Edward! Don’t you see I’m so happy now? Don’t let us ever—Besides, I might not have heard. I was asleep too, you know, part of the night…Why don’t I know Elfrida? I’ve been dreadful about her; I’ve sometimes wished she was dead. Did you know? I’d have wished she’d never been born, only there had to be you. Why can I not know her? Do you think she ever misses us?”

  “But listen, Laurel—”

  “Oh, do you have to tell me? Do you want to tell me?”

  “Don’t you want to know?”

  “I know you’re here again now.”

  They talked, but not very much, by the drawing-room window in the hot, retarded dusk; all the doors and windows stood open to let air through the house which seemed to be empty, silent below and above them. He remembered, she had not let him turn up that playing-card on the floor on their wedding-day. He still saw the pattern on the back of the card. She remembered nothing; it was impossible to speak of forgiveness; that meant nothing, nothing. She was so happy, she said again. Once or twice she silenced him with her fingers or lips or in his arms drew closer round them a darkness in which they had never needed to speak of happiness. There was no question even of pity; this ruled that out. Then drawing gently away herself, not her gentleness, leaning her head on the window frame, she watched the roofs disappear once more into the night. It had been a long day. She thought of sleep and of a hundred solitary woman’s wakings, beside but without him; here, in their high room at Batts, or soon in that unknown room in Brittany within sound of the sea.