The Dangerous Years (12 page)

“You see?” said Tom Batten, drawing Mary's hand to the shelter of his arm. They stood behind the big screen, which had been pushed, half-closed, at right-angles to the wall, making an alcove.

“I am not musical,” said Mary. But something had disturbed her; the tip of the wing of genius, perhaps. She wanted to add, ‘But I love you, I love you!' She accused herself of hysteria. But she did not withdraw her hand.

In the middle of Christmas week, during those days of gathering gloom beside the death-bed of the year, Joan received a letter from her husband. It was addressed to her mother's cottage at Limpsfield, for Joan had not informed him of the flight to Paris. There it had lain over Christmas, until the woman went in to re-direct it.

John was puzzled, and rather angry. What was Joan up to, he asked. A quarrel was a quarrel, though he could see no reason for it. But to take it too far was beyond all understanding, and he began to wonder if she was not working up for a nervous breakdown. She was doing too much, that was the trouble. He realised, he said, that life during term was over-full for her, with all the necessary social round; but to that she had been adding this research for her Professor, month after month without a break. No wonder that she had begun to imagine things. But to leave him out at Christmas like this, and to go home to her mother without making arrangements for the rest of the vacation, was carrying the misunderstanding too far. He had missed her terribly, even while following the trip along the Pennines. That had been wonderful, and would have done her a world of good if she had only been persuaded to come with him. It was, in fact, rather dreary doing it alone, he wouldn't mind admitting; especially after that absurd row before she went off to Surrey. What
was there to quarrel about, after all? Personally, he asked no more of marriage than he had already received, the staunch companionship of a person who wanted no more truck with sentimentality, and all that kind of thing, than he did.

At this point in the letter, Joan stopped reading, consumed by rage, and by despair. She found herself weeping, and had to wait a while before she could resume her attack on the letter. During this pause, she saw through her tears the dangerous result of trying to assume a character one does not naturally possess. School, Newnham, and this academic marriage, following the upbringing in a fatherless household where the widow lived repressed and artificially determined to sacrifice herself to the memory of the dead; this had been Joan's world, luring her to the choice of an epicene attitude that had kept her creative instincts dormant until after marriage. She could not realise now that she wept for this deceit. The struggle against it remained, however; the struggle and the resentment against the man who might so easily have released her, as she unconsciously had hoped. But she had picked the wrong man.

The hopelessness lay in the fact that he was so decent, so faithful, so sublimely unaware, in his manichean contempt for the pleasures of the flesh. He was nearly ten years older than herself; but she felt that he was still a healthy schoolboy, with mud-caked knees, and interminable talk about the football field. Only with John it was mountains, and all the jargon of the climber. His official work at the physical laboratory he never discussed with her. That was another grievance. She wanted to be really an equal, not merely a playmate.

She read on, with nothing elucidated in her aching mind. John said that he proposed to come down to Limpsfield to fetch her, and to talk things out sensibly. So would she either ring him up early on Christmas Eve,
or come home the day before, when he proposed to return?

Panic seized her. He would have gone down to Limpsfield and found the house empty. Would he know where to find the woman, to learn that they were in Paris? Of course he would, and that meant he was likely to follow. This letter was days old; it had been drifting about in the Christmas postal flood. What was to be done with him if he turned up here? But she realised that the shock of finding her vanished from the country might give him to pause. He did nothing on the spur of the moment. He had always to rope himself securely, and cut a foot-hold, before any advance. That was what made him such a good scientist, and a good mountaineer. It was not likely that he would do anything desperate, or even impulsive. She was assured of that.

By the way, he went on, as a means of making lighter weather, he had seen in
The Times
that a Colonel Batten was concerned in these recent revelations about the faked balance sheets of a certain Trust Company, as one of the many directors. Was that anything to do with her mother's correspondent, the Dr. Batten in Paris, who wrote to her every year?

Joan stared at this paragraph; read and re-read it. Her distrust of the colonel was justified, after all. Her feelings about men were not far wrong, she was able to tell herself. The rest of her husband's letter hardly mattered. His schoolboy emotions paled beside this bit of news. She left the last paragraph unread, jumped up, and went through to her mother's room. But it was empty.

Here again was something odd. Mother had not said she was going out. Usually she lay on her bed for a nap after luncheon, and Joan had imagined she was asleep now.

The girl decided to go for a walk alone. It would give her a chance to think over John's letter, and to
consider what was to be done if he should follow her to Paris. She was so afraid of him now. She loved him, she wanted him. But she hated him for the cheat of their relationship.

She found the streets of Paris once again suffused with delicate sunlight, dust-moted with frost. The bare plane trees in the boulevards were almost ethereal, only their rounded fruits hanging distinctly, a sparse punctuation here and there. Down in the Luxembourg Gardens the air cleared a little, except for the smoke from a bonfire of tree-prunings, a scarf of blue-grey that wound among the empty boughs and along the avenues, carrying a bittersweet perfume out of the past, out of the wilderness. Joan smelled it, and her instinctive longings added fuel to her anger and frustration. She walked faster, round and round the more rural part of the Gardens where the espaliers of pears gave a privacy to lovers, and sorrowers. She was not among the former, and bitterness drove her away when she came upon a couple, sitting on a seat round a bend in the path. They were abandoned to each other, their mouths joined. She saw that they were middleaged. Disgusting! she said to herself; people of that age! But she knew that she was disgusted with herself because of the surge of hunger that gripped her. She turned back, hurriedly, and made for the open, towards the palace and the pond.

This problem of John had to be thought out, however. She slowed her pace, weighing the matter in her mind. If he comes, she said to herself, repeating the phrase again and again, and getting no further. If he comes! I want him to come, she almost cried aloud; but the desire was pushed back into the wild. It was these instinctive longings that had caused all the trouble. If only she could live with John in that equable, boyish comradeship, all would be plain sailing. But life was not proving so simple as that. Even this momentary touch of the senses, the
smell of the wood-smoke, could upset the balance of a nicely-ordered relationship.

She heard a thrush singing, too. It sat in a lanky chestnut tree, one of the grove leading towards the pond, and its voice rang out in the afternoon air, a triple-sounding challenge to the time of the year, carrying messages of hope and even of certainty; new worlds, new generations, the full cycle of life. She stood below, looking up at the tiny, living ocarina in the tree-top. More evidence to call her a liar, and her husband a fool!

No further advanced in her cogitation, Joan approached the pond, where a crowd of French citizens and their children were in movement around the rim, all engaged in sailing new boats, shouting and laughing, urgent with directions and warnings, everybody happy, especially the elders. The pond was full of this puerile traffic; tiny yachts, schooners, yawls, with sails of white, blue, plumcolour; modern vessels of steel, driven by clock-work, and some by steam (leaving a nostalgic whiff of methylated spirit over the surface of the water). Collisions occurred, to the accompaniment of shouts and cries of alarm. Two sailing vessels would become entangled, their progress arrested, while they clung together with shuddering sails, their owners unable to come to the rescue until they drifted inshore.

Joan watched with some curiosity, jostled even out of her worries for a while, her trained mind always ready to respond to a call to objectivity. She stood w
^r
atching a noble vessel, three feet long, whose rigging was exact in miniature and scale. The son and father were at work rigging the sails. Then the boat was launched. She watched it, and the first ripple as it responded to the fingers of the wind. The sails swelled out, the boat swung through a few degrees, then surged forward, the water almost cluck-clucking at the bows. “Oh!” murmured the young woman, and the gratified French father smiled at
her as he passed, staff in hand, to run round to the opposite side of the pond, while the boy chose the other direction, bent and weighed down by anxiety.

Following the progress of the boat, she began to speculate where it would come to land. Then she saw the group across the water, three people and a child, in the act of launching a similar vessel. She saw Colonel Batten, the American Mr. Sturm, and little Adrian Batten, all three crouching, their heads together round the boat. Standing over them, intent as themselves, and holding a man's walking-stick and gloves, was her mother.

When Mrs. Winterbourne went down to the lounge to find a newspaper which she might take to read as a persuasive to her afternoon nap, she met Colonel Batten, who was on his way out.

“You can't waste this winter sunshine,” he said, when she told him of her purpose. “Break your habit for once. It is good to break away from habits. It helps us to forget that we are prisoners.”

She needed little prompting, for since Christmas Day the regularity of her life had been much disturbed. She had seen the colonel frequently, and with increasing attachment. It had not been necessary to tell Joan of these encounters, some by appointment, others of chance, or what seemed chance.

“I'm helping young Adrian to sail his boat.” The colonel took her hand and looked into her eyes. It was an appealing gesture, characteristic of him, as she had already found out. That was perhaps what attracted her; the boyish confidence, as though he assumed that she was here to be depended on, to be appealed to, to decide things for him. Yet with this, he contrived to be very masculine, very protective. He gave her the impression almost of physically enveloping her. And that was a comfortable sensation, after so many years walking alone against the east winds of life.

“You don't mind if our friend Sturm comes too?” he said, as though she had already agreed to accompany the party. “I'd sooner we were alone, but it has already been arranged. You see, Sturm wants to know the boy more intimately, if he is …” The colonel stopped, afraid that he had said too much. Mary loved that out-of-countenance hesitancy. It was part of the innocence of the man.

“I'll come,” she said, “wait while I fetch my coat.”

She reappeared in a half-length Persian lamb coat, with hat to match. The effect was dainty, giving her a diminutive quality that enhanced her trim figure and the lovely outline of her cheeks and brow. Her silvery hair peeped out from the toque. The colonel's eyes were hungry.

“Mrs. Winterbourne,” he said, “Mary …!” And he adjusted the silk handkerchief at her throat. Before she could restrain herself, or consider the consequences, she took his hand and held it still, within an inch of her throat. “Please,” she whispered.

“I know! I know!” he answered, hoarsely. Then he turned and propelled the swing door, urging her along. When they were outside, he took her arm, and they walked up the road without speaking for several minutes, both considerably agitated.

“Where do we meet Mr. Sturm?” she asked at last, and with some effort of will.

Batten did not reply. He had not yet returned to earth. Mary felt herself being half-carried along, like a Sabine woman.

“How long have you been alone?” he asked. She knew what he meant.

“He was killed in the Battle of Loos,” she replied, amid a conflict of feeling.

Amongst those emotions was a sense of gratitude to her companion for bringing the memory of her husband into the relationship. It was as though he were being consuited,
asked for his approval; everything above-board. She looked at the man walking beside her, and saw no stranger. Perhaps the pressure of her arm on his hand, drawing it to the side of her breast, was involuntary. It was instantly responded to.

“Look, Mary …” he began. But he could find no word. After some hesitation, he answered her previous question. “Sturm is meeting us at the pond in the Gardens. Ah! There's the infant, waiting with the concierge outside the flats. They're great friends. That man used to be a bandsman in the Alpine Corps. But Adrian makes friends everywhere—though he is an odd boy, more odd than at first appears. He seems a quiet youngster; not particularly bright, you understand. Not at schoolwork, though it is early days yet. His father is concerned about that, you know. Half the trouble is over this determination that he shall be an all-round fellow when he grows up. There's something almost classical about my brother. He should have been the Master of a college at Cambridge or Oxford. He's all for the well-balanced character. Something of a Spartan, perhaps.”

“Do you disagree with that … Tom?”

She used his name with only the faintest hesitation: and he was too interested in his nephew to notice the approach. The boy's personality must be pervasive.

“Not in principle. But I don't find it easy to live up to: though I ought to, since it's part of a soldier's training. We aren't always a perfect fit, are we, Mary? Do you find it so? Are you content with what circumstances have tried to make you?”