Friends and Relations Page 9

  4

  Lady Elfrida, wearing a large bright hat, went down slope by slope to the lake where, walking carefully on the slippery grass, she skirted the water. The lake, bending round the contour of the rise, had a rushing sluice at each end; the stream released from artifice went its way in curves through the shallow valley with a glad air of being its narrow self again. Over these flat meadows, pricked with budding flags and dark orchises, and over the mild ascent beyond, hung the whole bloom of June. Sky and earth married in light; blue on the trees and grass, a gold obscurity, like pollen, over the sky. It was very hot. But the lake, banked steeply round and the banks shadily planted, had a scene of its own; it was not exposed to the countryside. Pre-Tudor in origin, at one time the Abbey fish pond, it had now the charm, the gloom, the disassociation from use of a more recent polite century that had rebuilt the house and isolated a belvedere in Rodney’s orchards. Here Hermione fished, but though a few carp still moved darkly they were unaware of Hermione’s dangling pin. In despair, she had here abandoned the punt, adrift.

  Lady Elfrida, not finding anyone here, looked at the lake. She had in her unreflecting view, with the dark water, Edward’s annoyance—or chagrin? Had she done wrong? But no sense of delinquency shadowed her visit; she could not regret having come. Unaware that her coming had tipped a delicate balance, she delighted in what she had found. They were “in form”; the days had been dignified by a state of high amusement. Elfrida, who forgot herself easily, forgot herself here. Fervent in her deprecation of the scandalous (as agonizing) she was innocent and, like a woman in whom the sense of dress is deficient, had to refer any standard of the becoming constantly to her friends. At Batts they seemed to think there was nothing wrong. To be once more with Considine was delightful; he took on as much, in her view, from this domestic setting as he did in Janet’s from the social heightening and brightening Elfrida’s presence set up. In London, lunching or dining with Considine at those intervals of a year or so, she was oppressed by a sad conventionality in their attitude. But here they discovered a new spontaneity; she could only vaguely suppose they had once been mistaken.

  It was in the early mornings, or mornings for her early—when Edward’s children advanced to her bed with propriety, following in the breakfast-tray, and Considine’s great-niece, marking the further degree in relationship, hung like a hopeful sparrow about the door—that the for herself so fatal distinction between kinship and affinity was borne in most strongly upon Elfrida. At that hour conscience lies with the body supine, tenderly relaxed. And the clean young Tilneys standing along her bedside reproduced most strongly at that hour the whole family faculty for disapproval. She had certainly sinned, if only in lying now in her lace Dutch cap in a stream of mature sunshine, in seeking first the financial page of The Times (she speculated) or in refusing—contrary, she believed they believed, to the practice of grandmothers—an egg for her breakfast. Meanwhile the young Meggatt haunted her dressing-table, explored her cosmetics and, without reproach for the omission, put away her pearls.

  Yesterday had seen still another arrival at Batts. Elfrida and Considine, both out to evade Theodora, had today a quite new sense of complicity. Avoiding the skyline, swerving away from windows (the terrace was dangerous), stepping quickly back into trees or down banks, they had, alas, missed even each other. But at this point Considine came cheerfully, cautiously, down to the lake, signalling an “all clear.” Once more they were thrown together.

  Theodora’s arrival had disconcerted them all a little. She had telegraphed her intention from Dover and, picking up her car in London, had been with them, as she had promised, about halfway through dinner, effectively checking the meal’s rhythm. The downstairs machinery after the faintest possible jar reversed itself and began to produce soup again. The Meggatts’ attitude to Theodora was fatalistic. She was again to be with them. Marise and she, in whom a change of mind would be inadmissible, sometimes revoked a decision with calm certainty. So that, although they were not “artistic,” you never knew where they might not be. This time a breakdown of plans, a break-up of weather in the Tyrol, had disgraced the Tyrol for them. They returned to England without warning, repudiating the Continent. Their flat was let; Marise imposed herself on her club though there was not a room vacant; Theodora telegraphed to Batts that she would be coming. It was important for her, also, to see Janet.

  At Batts, Theodora was not surprised by the party’s composition. Surprise does, of course, imply interest: whatever she lacked she civilly did not show it. Beyond calling Edward Maisie, she had at no time seemed to take any account of the Tilney problem. Sitting down to dinner, impassible in her dark coat and skirt, she glanced at the company casually, superciliously—Elfrida’s damaged beauty, Considine’s dry polish—like someone’s notable tame panther loaned with its cage for the afternoon to a village entertainment.

  “I expected,” she said to Janet, who took on the charmed air of someone finally singled out, “to be abroad for at least another fortnight.”

  “That seemed too good to be true,” said Rodney pleasantly. They were on these terms. While Considine asked himself: “Where did I hear that charming voice before?” He had forgotten, before ceasing to regret, Lady Hunter Jervois.

  “Yet here I am,” resumed Theodora to Janet. Here she and Janet were in fact—after the very slight effort it took to discount Rodney and all the others—practically tête-à-tête.

  So next day, today, Janet was taken away from them all. Janet was not accustomed to being followed about; today, the whole of Theodora’s attention weighted her movements. She was investigated; her unmarried friend showed a lucid perplexity. Perhaps it did seem odd how one filled one’s days.

  But: “I must just ask So-and-so…” she went on. “I must just see about the such-and-such.”

  “Oh! Do you really have to?”

  And Theodora, in ironic patience, ground out cigarette after cigarette against the range, the chum, the mangle, against so many doors of “offices” that were meanwhile—it must be owned without apparent reference to Janet—calmly functioning. “I don’t see how one ‘sees after’ or ‘sees about,’ ” remarked Theodora. “Either one does a thing oneself or one doesn’t do it. Do explain, Janet.” In the dairy she ate a spoonful of cream, tasted the butter, felt sick but refused to go away. In the steam of the laundry she glowered like a djinn. “My beautiful,” she observed finally, “how you do fuss, don’t you?” Janet tried to remember if Theodora had really been like this last time and to understand how, if so, she came to be here again.

  As they crossed the bleach-green a bell swung high up in the stable cupola, knocking sparks from the blue air. One or two pigeons wheeled. “Twelve o’clock,” said Janet.

  “So what do you do now?”

  Janet not quite innocently said she had letters to write. They went into the library where Janet looked through a file, pressed her blotter open, took her cheque-book out of a locked drawer—she fell in in every way with her bank’s ideas. Theodora paced round the library, clicking her cigarette-case. Janet turned her dark head sideways in concentration; there was so much to think of, to do; she was in arrears. “There they go—” she sighed involuntarily, as Lady Elfrida and Considine passed the window. Their holiday was not at an end. Had she, in their company for these first bright days of summer—her first, perhaps, visible summer; when the season had halted for her, smiling at her direct—too entirely disengaged herself? She herself still lived and had to command emotion: they seemed to have died young. She lived—look at all these letters: she unscrewed the top of her fountain-pen. “There they go,” sighed Janet.

  “There go who?” said Theodora jealously.

  “Elfrida and Considine.”

  “Oh!…Shall you ever finish those letters?”

  “Dear Theodora, I cannot write if you loom,” said Janet mildly.

  “Darling, I cannot believe you can write at all. L
ook at the letters you send me.”

  The library certainly had become oppressive. Janet was supposed by them all to have no nerves; she agreed, with hardly a glance at herself. She wished Theodora embroidered, or even ever sat down. She supposed, Theodora is bored, Theodora is fond of me. It was twelve o’clock now; at twenty to one she would cross to the sofa, sit idle lest Theodora should be offended, give her entire attention, say: “Well, Theodora…?”

  Then she would listen to Theodora till a quarter past one, when the children must come in to wash for lunch: they ignored the Swiss maid’s peahen screaming: Janet must go out to add a note of authority. (Note: did Anna make Hermione disobedient?) Meanwhile, if a blue-bottle came into the library she must not attend—why did one not put wire gauze over windows like the Americans?—and if anyone came to the door she would frown. She would listen. Something was always the matter with Theodora—something was generally the matter with Edward…She fulfilled her engagement: “Well, Theodora…?” she said, closing her blotter.

  But Theodora was going to be sarcastic. She could not pass fatuity and said something about the children’s hour. But Janet amiably sat there and looked at her hands. This was her sort of friendliness, simply a disposition.

  “How long are they here for?” asked Theodora, ominously staring across the lawn.

  “Are who?”

  “Your couple.”

  But if Theodora were not like this, she would not be like anything. “Oh, indefinitely, I hope,” said Janet. “I’ve no idea.”

  “And what does poor Edward say?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You’d rather not have,” stated Theodora accurately. “Well, I daresay it’s time something happened.”

  “But, Theodora, so many things happen to you.”

  This Theodora quite overruled. “I suppose it has all been delightful these last few days? How bold you have been, Janet!”

  “We’re so fond of them both. I don’t see why we can’t be natural.”

  “That seems a rather curious observation from you,” said Theodora heavily.

  “Does it?…Tell me about the Tyrol.”

  “Good God, I didn’t come here to tell you about the Tyrol. Have you been happy?”

  “Yes, very, thank you,” said Janet. Sitting here with her back to the window she found the green glare of the lawn reflected along the walls, the glazed bookcase, the flank of the tallboise. These all had an immaterial quality as in firelight but drawn up in a stillness like water’s did not waver. She felt, through the open window, summer come into the cool room and touch her shoulders. “It’s been very fine,” she added.

  Theodora slid from the end of the sofa and bumped herself into comfort among the cushions. She heard steps turn back in the hall; she knew they must all know Janet was “coping” with Theodora, who would not be here long.

  “The fact is,” she exclaimed, “Lady Elfrida’s a fool. She longs to snub me. She tried at both the weddings and several times since. She laughs before I have finished speaking and says: ‘Oh, no, do you really?’ The fact is, she can’t bear other people to be amusing—well, look at poor dear Considine, look at you! She does love her own little angle. She’s really the worst kind of woman—no, listen, darling—quite automatic—”

  Janet thought back through this slowly. “But she likes Lewis; surely he is amusing?”

  “No,” said his sister’s friend.

  “And I think Hermione’s funny, don’t you? She likes Hermione.”

  “Anyhow, I’m Hermione’s godmother.”

  “Of course,” agreed Janet, alarmed by the pounce in her friend’s manner. “Hermione adores you,” she added.

  “Much good may that do her,” said Theodora darkly. “And does she adore Edward?”

  For Edward was Hermione’s godfather. This had been Rodney’s idea—and most, Theodora thought, most indelicate. She eyed Janet’s profile. They had intended, of course, to have asked Lewis. But Lewis was “so many godfathers”—Rodney had suddenly made this other gesture. Lewis had told Marise who told Theodora that Edward and Laurel had been, at the time, much discomposed by the suggestion and did not know how to reply. Continually, they were being worried by this sort of thing; pheasants, flowers from Batts, an invitation for Laurel to winter with Janet abroad. Stupefaction had, on that early occasion, carried the day with Edward. Now on Sundays, birthdays, family festivals his goddaughter tilted her gilt reflection about inside a silver mug of ironic magnificence, two-handled like the trophy that indeed it was. This celestial tie with their father gave Hermione what was, in view of the general Tilney sense of Meggatt delinquency, her sole moral advantage over Anna and Simon.

  “And of course,” went on Theodora, “Lady Elfrida does bore me. She’s the most tiresome kind of cathédrale engloutie, full of backwashes and large drowned bells.”

  “Nonsense,” said Janet kindly, hoping it pleased Theodora to be so clever.

  “And I also observe—”

  The fact was, Theodora could not keep off that extinct sin. Her resentment appeared surprising. But that old crater, now so cheerfully verdant, accounted, she thought, for the persistence of an emotional Edward in Janet’s landscape. Though the whole theory of victimization was disagreeable to Theodora, she could have forgiven Edward a childish anguish if this had not perpetuated itself. She could not forgive him this tenure it gave him, this mortmain on Janet’s spirit.

  Theodora was profoundly mistaken. Janet did not find Edward pathetic—or if she found him pathetic she was unmoved. Her ruling was largely domestic; she was impatient for order, distinguished grief from grievance, and deplored grievance as a delay of the faculties. Janet’s refusal to see Edward’s bruises had been definitive. For the root Edward had in her consciousness, a sort of vital misgiving one had only to love Janet to have suspected, Theodora might well have looked back to her own first view of him: a young man, a bridegroom, isolated by an occasion, stepping out through a window. She might have marked that wedding-day for the fatal climax of his hesitations, a misdirected lover’s. Had there been somewhere, sometime, a moment when Laurel’s sister took Edward’s measure; some glance of hers away from him to perfection of which he could not but be aware; from which glance, from which moment they both lived on involuntarily? There had been no question: unasked, the question always was at her elbow. With that unasked question, unanswerable, Edward need have no concern—but concern racked him. Just once they quarrelled, that hot night in London: now it would not be possible to violate Janet’s incuriosity.

  But the silent question was at her elbow still. Urgent, like Hermione (who wisely, when she did not want to be sent away, hardly breathed, hardly made herself known, made no claims). Like Hermione, always too much with her mother, too tensely present, it interposed, distracting her, made other intimacy impossible. At all times it was impossible to be alone with Janet.

  The clock-hand moved to a quarter past. The pair of cheerful shadows, crossing the lawn again, crossed the wall, the bookcases…There were moments—Edward’s handwriting on an envelope, his name casually in Janet’s talk—when Theodora, exasperated, sighted a large possibility of destruction; when Janet’s composure became something precariously but calmly held, some very delicate glass or a dish piled high with fruit that balanced curve on curve just not tottering. To splinter the vase, to knock the dish out of Janet’s hand, Theodora had only to cry: “You still love him.”

  A wild enough kind of justice. But violence was not distasteful to Theodora. If Batts found her a trifle over-emphatic, they could have no idea that she had once kicked through a door-panel, and once, annoyed on Leman, upset a canoe and made someone swim for it. Janet, who did not regard Theodora as dangerous, feared by the end of their talk that her friend had still to unbosom herself. Brushing Theodora’s ash off the cretonne she said: “The rest will be out for tea. You must tell me about Marise.
”

  “Will Rodney be there?”

  “I’m sure Rodney would like to hear about Marise too,” said Janet.

  5

  Tilney hair grew quickly, high off the forehead, low at the nape: even Simon had it. Long before Hermione Meggatt was due at the hairdresser’s Simon’s appearance became “artistic” (a drooping forelock), quite at odds with his character. While the “bob” framing Anna’s expression declined from a cool young page’s to a comedian’s, turning out at the ends. It was Theodora who pointed out, almost upon arrival, how fast deterioration set in with the young Tilneys. Their grandmother, seeing the pair for the first time at a disadvantage, rallied to them surprisingly. After an unsuccessful attempt with her nail-scissors she offered to take the two children herself to the hairdresser at Market Keaton. She thought: after all, we Tilneys do stand together. One afternoon, therefore, Considine packed the impassive children into the back of his car, where their bare knees, parted, grilled on the hot cushions. Lady Elfrida, tilting her hat-brim over her face, for she feared the sun, took her place in front. Considine was to drive them.

  Janet had not been sensitive on the Tilneys’ behalf. But she was glad to see their grandmother’s wings out over them, even a little. “Grandmother’s kind,” she said, leaning into the car to give Anna her gloves; then, going up the steps again, remained dark in the doorway to watch the departure. Hermione, who was over-excited, was not to accompany them. She did not care, she said. Lady Elfrida had the list of Janet’s messages safe in her handbag—no, oh dear, in the other handbag, what a good thing one had looked! Hermione was sent flying upstairs three times for this, for that, then for Anna’s grandmother’s parasol. But it was a good thing to start so calmly.