A World of Love (12 page)

‘Who, Guy?’

‘Oh, you well know who we’re talking about!’

‘Yes, I do; but you don’t, or you couldn’t ask such an unmeaning question. The whole of a man!’

‘I know,’ asserted the girl.

‘Believe what you like,’ cried Antonia. ‘He’s dead and out of it.’

‘You sound as though you were thanking God.’

‘No, I don’t think I am-why?’

‘Antonia, it was Guy who was there tonight.’

‘He always had rotten taste in company.—Well, go on, get out, open the gate!’

‘Why,
are
we here?’

‘Apparently,’ said Antonia.

They were. The Ford, knowingly slowing down, pulled up nose in to the warped white spears and chain knot of the Montefort entrance—the eating-out of rust through the last paint gave the gates, analysed by the headlights, more than their daytime aspect of dissolution: could they not be driven through like the horse? Obediently clambering out in her long skirts, Jane declared: ‘I still am not what you think.’ Shock, nevertheless, made her hands shake, mismanaging, so that the knot of links heavily only tightened upon itself, and while she fumbled away at it, watched by Antonia, she was impaled as the victim of a scorn which made her lower her head and shrink in her shoulders. Gates once open, Antonia shot through them and straight on, away down the avenue, leaving Jane to stare after the wobbling tail-light. She pulled to the gates and made fast the chain again in the dark.

At Montefort, Fred was still about—in the hall he had taken the chimney off the low-burning oil lamp on the table and was digging at the wick with his pocket-knife. Antonia, having put the car away, came through from the yard by the back door at the same moment as Jane came in at the front. He wiped the blade and closed it—just in time, for his daughter ran straight to him, put her arms round him and her face to be kissed, and remained there breathless in his astonished hold. ‘Steady,’ he said, steadying them both. ‘Why, your heart’s beating!’ ‘Is it?’

‘Like anything,’ said her father.

‘Are you glad I’m home?’

‘Began to wonder if you’d be there all night.’

‘Antonia,’ said Antonia, ‘dealt with that.’ Unrestrainedly coughing she shoved past them, grasped the banister rail and started to pull herself upstairs as though to bed; but halfway up changed her mind and sat down. From up there, a nightbird over their heads, she croaked: ‘Such a wonderful party…’

‘Was
it?’ Fred instantly asked Jane, to feel only, in her closeness to him, a half-movement like a submerged answer. Gathering his will together he gave her a sort of push out of his arms, as though it were better to have her at seeing distance—left to stand, she stood in a daze; while he, stupefied by the sweet mistake of the embrace, ran a hand down one side of his jaw and up the other, over the stubble. ‘Or, how was it?’ he tentatively went on.

A conspiratorial turn of Jane’s head towards the staircase invited him to see why she could not tell—now, at the minute, as things were. But there was a ‘later’, a reckless impassioned promise, a look of meaning to stay till they
were
alone, about her manner of sitting down on the hall’s least unsteady gothic chair, with its pile of musty folded horse-cloths. Slipping off a sandal, she shook out of it a hurting little stone from the avenue. He asked: ‘How did you manage to pick that up?’

‘Certainly not at the castle; it’s richly carpeted.’

‘So it ought to be.’ Mind upon something else, he turned to put the chimney back on the lamp—then: ‘What you’re wearing, what you’ve got on,’ he said, ‘is it new, or would it be very old? Is it that dress out of the trunk?’

‘Don’t you like it?’

‘It makes you different, to me. But then that could be tonight, of course.’ He again considered her. ‘I don’t suppose I’ve ever seen you before when you’d just come home from any party. So it could be that.
—
Is
it the dress out of the trunk?’

‘Yes. Am I different?’ she asked, stooping down to put on the sandal.

All he said was: ‘If you had lived here more…’

Jane sat on giddily in the hot lamplight: on the wall behind her hung generations of coats, cloaks, mackintoshes, and she leaned her head back into them with a sigh. Her father said: ‘I had a glass of milk for you. Do you want it?’

Up there, Antonia’s watching-and-waiting attitude, known to this staircase in whose shadows and corners she had in adolescence so often crouched, now was changed by a new activity—she began licking brine from one of her wrists. In one half of the self which had come apart she was recalling the sea as she had left it—nobody’s, empty as a glass under heat mist which began to darken, tide sucking at the beach as it went out. There had been no other swimmer—none in reality. For the other half of her, what went on in the hall down there was more and more assuming a grotesque cast: there had been a race between herself and Jane into Fred’s arms, and the girl had won. Antonia counted the times when he and she could have been lovers: could one continue what was never begun? Tonight the answer could have been, yes. Everything was magnified and distorted; everything had its way with the unpent senses—the stone cast from the sandal spat like a shot on the floor; the lamp chimney around the urged-on lamp flame gave warning by an earsplitting crack, and the flame itself, spurting threads of itself and smoke stinkingly upward towards the ceiling, crimsonly stuttered inside the gloom it made like an evil tongue. Watching the scene being played out at the foot of the stairs, she saw at work in Jane, as in herself, the annihilating need left behind by Guy.

All salt from the wrist being now on tongue, Antonia allowed the wrist to drop. Instinctively turning, peering into the shadow between the banisters, she tried to fix whether, as a fact or not, the scene had a witness other than her—there, on the dark side of the projecting clock, ought to hang (and had certainly hung for years) the military photograph of Guy. One remembered its having been in position. How lately? Why should it not have fallen the last time plaster fell from the wall? If so, no one had said so—but who would ever say so, say so to her, when
her
sole recognition of the thing had been, from the outset, of an enormity?… Was he, all the same, looking on now?… Fred thickly cut across her line of vision; on his way through to the kitchen for the milk he passed between the banisters and the wall, followed almost immediately by a Jane unwilling to be left either behind him or near Antonia. Antonia, loth to have them out of her sight, still more so to be in sight of no one, got up and came down to follow the two. But it was the front door, left wide open upon the allaying night, which instead drew her.

Drawn she was, all but knowing why. Going to stand in the doorway, she was met at once by a windlike rushing towards her out of the dark—her youth and Guy’s from every direction: the obelisk, avenue, wide country, steep woods, river below. No part of the night was not breathless breathing, no part of the quickened stillness not running feet. A call or calling, now nearby, now from behind the skyline, was unlocatable as a corncrake’s in uncut grass. A rising this was, on the part of two who like hundreds seemed to be teeming over the land, carrying all before them. The night, ridden by pure excitement, was seized by hope. All round Montefort there was going forward an entering back again into possession: the two, now one again, were again here—only the water of their moments had run away long since along the way of the river; the root-matted earthiness and the rockiness were as ever their own, and stable. All they had ever touched still now physically held its charge—everything that had been stepped on, scaled up, crept under, brushed against or leaped from now gave out, touched by so much as air, a tingling continuous sweet shock, which the air suffered as though it were half laughing, as was Antonia.

Exhilaration caught her in the lungs. Their tide had turned and was racing in again: here was the universe filling up—all there had been to be, do, know, dare, live for or die for at the full came flooding to this doorstep. Doom was lifted from her. Moreover all was certain: nothing could have been firmer than this doorstep on which she bodily stood (this stone which though it had cracked and sunk had cracked no wider, sunk no further) except Antonia’s certainty of tonight. This was not the long-ago, it was
now
or nothing—the stink of the expiring lamp came fanning out from the hall behind her; unmistakably was her stout shadow cast forward over the little garden. Ghosts could have no place in this active darkness—more, tonight was a night which had changed hands, going back again to its lordly owners: time again was into the clutch of herself and Guy. Stamped was the hour, as were their others.

What was returned to her was the sense of ‘always’—the conviction of going on, on and on. His and her customary battles, ordeals, risks had been so many violent testings of immortality; nor had the two of them yet not won. They had used an unpitying roughness with one another—and yes, the brunt of that was to be felt again. What had started, when first she came to the door, as a righting and pacification of her senses had gone on to be an entire re-tuning of them. Bodily she had been left a clean slate, as it were at the start of a child’s day—likely to be, and being, soon scored all over with cuts, stings, burns, bruises, grazes and brambly flesh-tearings. Inflicted wrenchings echoed over her joints; once again she tasted the poison-berries experimentally forced between each other’s lips to see whether it
was
possible to kill. What they did to each other, or at each other’s expense, uncaringness kept from having been cruelty, just as unknowing-ness kept it from having been love. They conceived of no death, least of all death-in-life—an endless rushing, or rushing endlessness, was their domain, as it was their element. They had, by their action upon each other, generated a ceaseless energy, which accumulated in them when they did not use it—when they went blank, for instance, when they projected nothing, or when, all out, they flung themselves down into abeyances like dogs. Or, having been running, one bringing the other to a stop they would stand at attention, face to face, waiting for the signal to go on again, waiting to see from which of them it was to come—for not come it could not and never did.

That taut pause, that questioning confrontation, was again to rivet Guy and Antonia. This time, who gave the signal? Never had signal mattered so much—so much so that she flinched, or perhaps mistook it.—’Wait, I—’ she hurriedly said, aloud.

Above, Lilia came to her bedroom window. ‘What’s the matter? Who’s that you’re talking to?’

‘Is that
you,
Lilia?’ queried Antonia, shaken.

‘Yes. Why not?’

‘Can’t you sleep?’

‘Is Jane back—everyone back?’

‘Everyone’s back.’

‘Who did you say?’

‘Everyone.’

‘Who’s that down there with you?’

‘You must be dreaming!’

‘Your voice sounds funny, Antonia.—You’ll lock the door, then?’

‘Yes. Go back to bed. Good night.’

Antonia, having stepped back into the hall, lost no time in barricading the door behind her, which she did with a lightheaded willingness, going through a performance which meant nothing—forcing the key round in the stiff lock, letting drop the crossbar into its sockets. Not since Montefort stood had there ceased to be vigilant measures against the nightcomer; all being part of the hostile watch kept by now eyeless towers and time-stunted castles along these rivers. For as land knows, everywhere is a frontier; and the outposted few (and few are the living) never must be off guard. But tonight the ceremony became a mockery: when Antonia had done bolting and barring she remained, arms extended across like another crossbar, laughing at the door. For the harsh-grained oak had gone into dissolution: it shut out nothing. So was demolished all that had lately stood between him and her… Behind her, however, was someone else.

Locking up the house officially was Fred’s duty; having heard Antonia at it he came to check up, halting where, at the distant end of the hall, the archway led from the kitchen passage. ‘Why—thanks!’ he exclaimed.

‘That’s all right,’ she said, turning round, ‘you were with a girl.’

That he took bemusedly, with a love-foolish half laugh. Antonia’s affably going on, ‘Quite like old times,’ made him twist the grin off his mouth uncertainly, to remark no more than, ‘Well, that’s one way to put it.’

‘Jane is quite a girl.’

‘She’s asleep,’ he gave out, suddenly very sternly. ‘Beat out, whatever they did to her over there. You and I’d better somehow get her to bed.’

‘Oh, by all means.’ Antonia went with Fred along the stone way into the kitchen—on the table a candle was burning; near it Guy’s latest love, seated, had fallen forward cheek on her arms like a tired servant; by her the tasted glass of milk. Antonia, not urgently putting aside the tumble of hair, looked down: here was beauty—never more beautiful than now in its dereliction and with its hopeless air of forgotten promise. From where had the girl got it, and so purely? She had ravened nothing but fairness out of her mother.
Our
blood, his and mine, thought Antonia, roundabout by way of the byblow Fred. Asleep and besotted Jane, wine on her breath, made a point for the confluence of lost bright forces. Antonia cried out: ‘She should have been his daughter!’

The words were out—under them, Jane slept on unstirred. On the stove top there sizzled drip from a kettle. After some time: ‘Were you speaking to me?’ Fred asked.