Friends and Relations Page 6

  But it is quite all right so please do not worry. Please do not not sleep, either! that must be awful; I always sleep so well. Rodney and I are to be married in October, as I think I told you. I hope you will all come. I expect you will like the Mellyfield girls more later on. People often do seem silly at first, especially many people. I am glad you like acting; yes, I should like to see you act sometime. It is kind of you to say you think about me; I am sure at a time like this one is glad to be wished luck. Did I say I would write? I am so sorry.

  I have a great many presents to thank for, especially rugs and clocks. Uncle Considine is giving us a Bentley. I am afraid this is rather a stupid letter. It feels a very long letter for me to write.

  Yours affectionately,

  JANET.

  P.S.—I quite agree with you about all music mistresses.

  As term went on this letter, folded inside Theodora’s camisole, became limper and limper until it entirely ceased to crackle. At last it fell out through the neck of her blouse while she turned a somersault on the horizontal bar. She exposed Lewis Gibson to his sister; she said he was what she would call officious. On the stairs at night she put Jenna right on the subject of love.

  “No, you’re wrong,” she said. “It’s something going on inside all the time like your stomach. Nothing makes any difference to it, not even the person.”

  “But that would not be interesting, Theodora.”

  Marise pointed out later that Theodora was not even correct. For surely even the stomach had intermissions between digestion?

  8

  A quarrel, a miserable affair, had for one day suspended Janet’s engagement. Between herself and Rodney nothing was at fault. It was Edward who made an unfortunate entrance at Trevor Square, one evening forgotten by night when heat implacably closed, like glass, the open balcony windows. It was nine o’clock; he had been working late; and coming in to find Janet with his mother, could have sworn he interrupted a smile that was not for him. He sat down—but the place had never been home to him. Something about his manner drove his mother from the room, in unkind exaggeration of flight. She abandoned some peonies she had been settling in the Chinese bowl—she did everything, flowers themselves, at unnatural hours. The peonies dropped from the table; Edward went down on his knees to look for them among the furniture. Janet, standing in what remained of the light, said: “Oh dear.” He was furious at her resignation.

  “Why are we all in the dark?”

  “I can’t think—are we?” said Janet. They could see each other too plainly: it became obvious they were to quarrel. Edward, picking up the last of the peonies, said, too pleasantly: “My mother is never alone, is she.”

  “I shall be going home on Friday.”

  “You misunderstand me—”

  She knew she did not. “How’s Laurel?”

  “Hating this heat.”

  She may or may not have smiled, sitting there on the sofa mysteriously engaged with herself. “But Tilneys,” continued Edward, “generally seem to be overwrought. Did Rodney notice?”

  “Rodney? Oh no, why? I think you exaggerate. I’ll go to bed now, then you can talk to Lady Elfrida.”

  “But it’s nine o’clock.”

  “Then I’ll read.”

  “But you don’t read, do you?”

  “I can,” said Janet, with an audible smile.

  “You never ask what’s the matter, do you? Perhaps you don’t notice.”

  “Well, I did think you were being a little odd. Are you tired, Edward?”

  “Oh, no,” said Edward with irony. At home already he had reduced Laurel to tears. “Why should I be tired?” He picked up a newspaper and staring at it in the dusk, went on in a raised level voice as though reading aloud: “You see, Janet—or perhaps you may not see—things are being difficult at the best, and your attitude makes them impossible.”

  “I didn’t know I had an attitude,” said Janet, genuinely surprised.

  Edward preserved an ironic silence.

  “But, Edward, we really cannot quarrel. Please…Do think of what is convenient: we are relations for life. I mean, we shall stay with each other, shan’t we, at Christmas and everything? It would be impossible for Laurel and me to be divided. For as long as we live, I suppose about fifty years, we shall all always be meeting and talking over arrangements. At least, that is how we have been brought up. You must see what families are; it’s possible to be so ordinary; it’s possible not to say such a lot. I didn’t expect you’d want me to say I was sorry about the Meggatts; I thought that was all understood. I never can say things anyhow. Did you really think I was marrying into them to annoy you?”

  “Why should I think you should want to annoy me?” returned Edward coldly. Feeling his way from switch to switch he turned on all the lights. He blinked; the darkness gone from the room seemed to inhabit him. Looking back at the moment afterwards, he seemed to himself to have suffered some distortion and to have thought of her as inflicting this. Standing back from the sofa, her implacable face with the downcast eyes his mark, he began: “If you ever cared for him—”

  Janet looked up.

  “I hope,” she said, “Laurel may never know you. You are like a malicious, horrible child.”

  They both thought of the fifty years. Edward, from whom some dark but positive virtue seemed to have gone out, was deserted by feeling. “You exaggerate,” he said tentatively. She could not dislike what had been said more than he did; he considered, however, that it was for her to speak. They must get back somehow. She, however, not looking again at him, allowed two clocks to tick and the last outgoing traffic—lorries, what sounded like a removal in furniture vans of entire London—to drag its slow iron chain down the Brompton Road. Either she was without mercy or she could think of nothing to say. Edward left the room and went home. As she refused to do even that for him he did not say good night.

  His visit had been brief: Lady Elfrida, about to come down again, looked down with surprise from her bedroom landing at his descending head. She, of course, reproached herself. The long low little room, left alone with Janet, was mortally disconcerted; the lamps staring. A room does not easily re-compose itself, laugh, remark some inconsequence, remember a tune. Lady Elfrida would have recovered herself almost at once. “Gone?” she said, coming in.

  “He had to go,” said Janet.

  Edward arrived home in desperation. The refractions of this upon Laurel were endless but she did not dare weep again that night. Next morning she came in a taxi to Janet and wept there. “Janet, what can you have said to him?” She saw plainly that Janet must be in the right, she was so hard. She implored Janet to be kinder. At this point, Rodney was announced; Janet meeting him collectedly on the stairs broke off their engagement provisionally. Rodney, seeing that she was not herself, said he would come back at six and went away considerately. He knew that girls, even Janet, had an emotional family life, but that he and she would be married in October. Meanwhile, Lady Elfrida could not be kept from her own drawing-room; it had to be explained to her that Laurel did not know why she was weeping. She said at once that Laurel must be going to have a baby. Laurel repudiated the baby; Lady Elfrida said that at all events it was wretched to be a woman and gave her two tickets for the Ballet. A note from Edward to Janet arrived by special messenger. He asked that nothing might be remembered; she wrote back: “Naturally.” Three friends of Lady Elfrida’s arrived for lunch. At five o’clock Lewis Gibson appeared with his new car to ask Janet to come for a turn round the Park. He found Janet packing. What she would really like, she said, would be to be driven to Cheltenham, not today but tomorrow. Lewis vibrated with comprehension. Lady Elfrida detained him but he had time that night to write to his sister at Mellyfield and telephone to Edward and Mrs. Studdart.

  Next day, till Uxbridge she sat like a sad Holbein; at High Wycombe he made her laugh, before Oxfo
rd she was cheerfully looking about her. Afternoon light for years was stored on the Cotswolds; Lewis, swerving along the taut ridge road, kept offering his companion the horizons and the sky. Cheltenham, white in trees, appeared grander than London; on the hills around, villas tilted comfortably in their gardens at a deck-chair angle were past amazement. Lewis thought of tea; Janet felt lighter for the birth of this positive grief.

  At Corunna Lodge they found Rodney rolling the tennis court with her father. Some presents had come, and a longer letter from Edward who thought he must have been mad. Rodney kissed her and did not speak of yesterday—they were, of course, to marry. The garden was gauzy with midges; they had tea out of doors where the willow wept in a cheerful trickle against the sun. Lewis produced a good deal of laughter and Colonel Studdart, liking the young fellow, confessed he did not know where he should be without both his daughters. Lewis, who was composing a letter to Edward, replied earnestly: “You must marry again.” Meanwhile Mrs. Studdart and Janet opened the presents together, agreeing how nice it was that Rodney should like Lewis.

  That afternoon leading on to July was mother to a succession; a personal calm set in and the weather remained equable. Nothing, when Janet looked back over the years for its reassurance, nothing of that afternoon remained particular but a picture of Lewis, crosslegged on the grass in a cloud of midges, polishing his spectacles on his knee. And the birth of a joke: whenever Colonel Studdart mislaid his detective story, choked or received no answer to a pre-paid telegram, he would make round eyes in imitation of Lewis and say: “I must marry again.”

  In August Rodney went up to Scotland and Janet accompanied her parents to Cornwall—it was easier to be apart. Returning, Rodney found September still ahead and a little terrible. Her trousseau was not complete. He stayed at Batts—the place was henceforth to command him—and came very little to Cheltenham. The young Tilneys, who could not leave London for long again so soon after Dalmatia, visited the Daubeneys in August for a long weekend.

  In September, Laurel discovered she was going to have a baby. Resolving to keep the matter for as long as possible from Lady Elfrida, she attended the wedding with a sense of double importance. At the wedding, Lady Elfrida was very much present. It was she who helped Janet into the gold dress.

  Part II

  The Fine Week

  1

  Anna and Simon Tilney, crouching among the bushes, bit into the sharp green gooseberries that turned their palates to blotting-paper. They spat the gooseberries out again: this was just for sensation. Their cousin’s great-uncle Considine, stretched between the low spiny branches, lay almost relaxed beside them. Between his head and the earth Anna had slipped a cabbage leaf. His hands, on the leaf, were clasped loosely under his head; one eye was closed, one glassy with light reflected the sky where a hawk swung and dropped a little. This hazy and close afternoon of Whitsunday the three had gathered without purpose in a remote quarter of Batts’s kitchen-garden. Considine was not fond of children but found himself perpetually among them. The Tilneys’ young cousin Hermione Meggatt still hung about the stables, vainly calling them. It seemed curious that an only child should not have accustomed herself to solitude.

  “It’s too high,” Simon said impatiently of the hawk. “You couldn’t shoot it, even with a gun. Go on, please.”

  Anna, gently prodding Considine in the ribs with the toe of her sandshoe, said: “Yes, go on,” with equal authority. He had been telling them a story about a tiger.

  “Well, the arm went gangrenous and had to be cut off. We had no anaesthetic.”

  “Gas, ether, chloroform,” explained Anna to Simon. “Which hadn’t you?” she said to Considine.

  “We hadn’t anything.”

  “So then what did you do?”

  “I took it off,” said Considine. The children hugged themselves, squatting lower. “Does a black man’s arm go blacker when it goes bad, or does it go blue? Describe.”

  “I don’t know that I could…”

  “But haven’t you ever seen a man quite eaten?” Simon said, dissatisfied.

  Considine’s reputation certainly did diminish. The Tilneys succeeded in laying bare large intervals of vacuity. They could not imagine, obviously, what he really had done with his life: either child could have lived it better on his behalf. “So what did you do then?” they kept asking. They had a strong feeling for continuity. Now he could not remember, for instance, what he had done with the gangrened arm. Burned it? Buried it? Surely one should remember burying an arm? Or if he gave it to somebody, what did the man who took it away do then? His memory seemed unnatural, he could not remember wondering or comparing, or being at all surprised. His very tigers looked thin on this background of no-speculation.

  “Well then, invent,” said Simon kindly. “Tell us about an imaginary tiger getting into a girls’ school.”

  “I’m asleep now,” said Considine, stung. In his time, he had passed for a raconteur.

  Simon himself was beginning a much better story about a tiger when Anna jerked him down suddenly and put a hand on his mouth. “Here’s Aunt Janet, and we are not playing with Hermione.”

  But Janet was not concerned with her daughter’s unpopularity. She came down the path slowly, not wondering where anybody was. She had counted back thirteen Whitsundays and was trying to remember how she had spent the fourteenth. She had been married ten years and was pleased by any recurrence, monotony having already set up in her life its delicate rhythm. She walked hatless in yellow linen under the veiled sky; her face was clear to the children and Considine, who found nothing to read there.

  Janet, who went nowhere without purpose, had come out to look at the gooseberries. The excellent tart at lunch had occasioned discussion. Rodney, who had by now his acres of orchard, suffered rather than encouraged the extravagant kitchen-garden and spared few of his men for it. Soft fruit for the house was not plentiful. If from now on she were to feed her household on gooseberry tart and gooseberry fool, as they desired, would any be left to ripen in July when Laurel and Edward joined them? Last year she had had new raspberry canes put in, but these also seemed likely to disappoint her. It was difficult. Colonel Studdart and Lewis Gibson were at Batts for this weekend; Mrs. Studdart had a bazaar coming on and could not leave Cheltenham. The Tilney children were here, convalescent from measles, to give Laurel a rest.

  This present garden, her own, locked in high walls with its tradition of order, its Sunday silence, dissolved Janet’s perspective of Whitsuns. Her thought—if it were thought—stopped. Looking closely along the gooseberry bushes she saw, between the bushes (she did not know how unwillingly), the Tilney children. The aunt in her took command.

  “You’ll get horrid pains.”

  “We’re spitting them all out again.”

  “That seems silly, too,” said Janet. Considine, lying moveless under her no-comment, remained as the earth. He was not their aunt’s affair. He and she could inhabit one house in intact solitude, unaware of those small obligations to speak or smile that make encounters tedious. They overlooked one another in perfect amity. Now she passed up and down the rows of bushes, lifting the low, heavy branches and stooping to look under them. The Tilneys, always surprised a little by life at the Abbey, felt that childhood here was certainly at a discount. Their aunt Janet was not concerned with them. At home in Royal Avenue, everything the two children did had for their parents a poignant and charming importance. Edward and Laurel could hardly bear not to participate. Edward was always best pleased to discover them in the cellar or on the roof. The tabus of his own childhood had obtained for his children a system of rather paralysing unrestrictions. Their world which he believed himself constantly to inhabit was mysterious in Edward’s imagination. From real affection and a shyness of asking for money the two never confessed that they would have preferred the rink or the riding-school to the afternoon twilight of Kensington Gardens, or tea ta
ken to a band at the Trocadero to tea in the cave their father and mother built for them under the dining-room table. They secretly longed to play golf. Their uncle Rodney spoke of making a links at the Abbey: they considered him perfectly adult.

  “Are you looking for Hermione?” asked Anna helpfully.

  “No.”

  “We don’t know where she is.”

  “I expect she’s quite happy,” said Janet. She pulled up some roots of groundsel and passed on: the afternoon had altered. Anna returned her toe to Considine’s ribs. “Now go on,” she said. “Tell us something that isn’t about tigers.”

  The white afternoon, undisturbed by wind or sunshine, undeepened personally by any hostility or attraction, hung gently, heavily over Batts. The large yellow stone house was quiet, with loud clocks. Rodney finished the Observer in the library, pressed the paper back into its folds and took it out to Colonel Studdart. He knew his father-in-law would have been glad of it sooner, but there were limits to hospitality. By this time, as it turned out, Colonel Studdart was asleep, his panama tipped over his eyes, in a wicker chaise-longue under the copper beech. Under the same maroon canopy another chaise-longue, empty, indicated an intention of Janet’s. This quest of shade on a sunless day surprised Rodney, but Colonel Studdart’s reasoning was faultless: you sat out only when it was hot, and when it was hot you sought a fine dark shadow. Colonel Studdart, to whom consciousness among all these cushions must have been pleasant, seemed sorry to have fallen asleep; a droop of incomplete resignation lengthened his chin. Sleep by day is seldom wholly dominant. Is it the misgivings of a journey but half accomplished that make the face of a daytime sleeper so uneasy, so remote from enlightenment that the whole range of waking sensibility lies between this and the triumphant serenity of the dead?