Complete Short Stories (VMC) (30 page)

Catherine was disappointed, for it was Mrs Ingram she loved and admired, not Esmé and Esmé himself looked sulky again. He watched his mother going away from them along the terrace and his eyes were full of contempt, as if he knew some secret she had, which he despised. He stood up and said, ‘Well, then,’ in a hearty voice, trying to seem gaily anticipatory, but not managing it.

Mrs Ingram had a small motor launch which was used for visiting her friends up and down the river, and in this, sitting beside one another in wicker chairs, Esmé and Catherine drove sedately under the summer darkness of the trees. The easy gaiety had gone and Catherine felt helplessly that Mrs Ingram had pushed her off alone with Esmé against his inclination, and she was puzzled to think what motive she could have for doing such a thing. If it was simply to be rid of her, then she need never have invited her; that she might be trying to lay the foundations of something deeper between Esmé and Catherine than this slight acquaintance they had was not in character with her rôle of possessive mother. Noël had once said: ‘It is lucky for you that you love me, not Esmé. Mamma never allows any girls within yards of her darling. They are just to be devoted to one another.’ Equally, that Mrs Ingram simply had, as she said, a headache was unthinkable. She was not a woman who would be likely to have headaches or confess to such frailty if she had. She was ordinarily so proudly direct that excuses were alien to her. She would not deign to dissemble or explain. When she did so, Catherine felt uneasily compelled to wonder why.

Some cloud was between mother and son. In other circumstances, Catherine would have thought that it gathered from Mrs Ingram’s jealousy. Her coldness might have been caused by Catherine and Esmé wishing to escape together, not from the reverse. For the second time that day Esmé set out to dispel the melancholy his mother had induced in Catherine. She recognised along the river features of the landscape she had discovered with Noël, and Esmé pointed them out to her as if she had never seen them before. Soon, his discourse became more than a commentary upon the river banks and the late Victorian and Edwardian houses, gabled and balconied, the rustic summer-houses, the lawns with urns of geraniums and flag-poles, and weeping copper-beeches, and began to be an excursion back through time; for here, he said, Noël had rammed the boat into the mooring-posts (‘Yes, he told me,’ Catherine whispered), and on that island disturbed a wasps’ nest in a hollow tree.

They were held up outside the lock, and at last the keeper came out and opened the gates. The peace and heat inside the lock were intense. As the water went down, Catherine, grasping a slimy chain, looked long at Esmé who stood up with the painter over a bollard and was lighting a cigarette. The most veiled of men, she suddenly thought him; his in some ways handsome face expressionless with discretion, the speed of his talk overcoming his reluctance to talk at all, and his easiness, his courtesy – with the lock-keeper at this moment – proclaiming almost that beyond this he was far removed and could not love, be loved, or have any exchange at all that courtesy or kindness did not dictate.

Beyond the lock, she found herself thinking: ‘We shall have to come back through it,’ in an echo of the triumph with which she used to say this aloud to Noël. Each lock had prolonged their aloneness, as indeed it prolonged her time with Esmé, but it was so much as an echo of an old thought that it came to her that she found herself telling Esmé now how once it had been.

At first, she thought his courtesy had deserted him. ‘Oh, look, a kingfisher,’ he said.

She looked in the wrong place and it was gone. ‘Another thing about the river,’ he said. ‘We can quite safely bring our unhappiness here. No one can reach it or be contaminated by it, as on dry land. I have felt that I was in quarantine with it these last weeks.’

‘But at home …?’ Catherine began.

‘No, I don’t think we can be safe there,’ he said rapidly. ‘I mean that other people would not be safe from us.’

‘I wonder if your mother wishes now that she hadn’t invited me.’

‘My dear little Cathy, what an odd thing to wonder. Or should I not call you “Cathy”?’

‘I liked to hear it.’ She had blushed with pleasure and surprise. ‘I wondered if the sight of me depresses her,’ she said humbly. ‘I suppose that we have only Noël in common. By the fact of just being myself I can only go on and on reminding her of him.’

‘You remind her of yourself and that she loves you. The dead can become too important, just by dying. Any ordeal is yours surely? Coming back to the house and the river and so much obviously that only you and Noël knew about.’ He spoke rather aloofly, to imply that being in love was not in his province, though he acknowledged it in hers. ‘But I understand,’ he added, ‘that it was probably now or never.’

‘I shouldn’t have liked it to be never. I love it here, being with your mother and seeing the house again – the
beautiful
house …’

‘Yes, I think it is the only nice one on the river,’ he said. He turned the boat round in mid-stream. ‘All of those rose-red villas with their fretwork balconies and the conservatories and so much wistaria … yet I miss it when I’m away, and it comes at me with a dismaying, not wholly depressing rush, when I return. Living in one place all of one’s youth makes being an expatriate very difficult. I think I shall go and live in London for a bit before I go abroad again. Go by instalments, as it were. It may halve the pains of departure. I must tell Mamma. Until I have done so, know nothing of it, please.’

‘Of course not,’ Catherine whispered.

‘Has Esmé said anything to you about leaving here?’ Mrs Ingram asked Catherine a day or two later.

‘No.’

‘Wide-eyed surprise, poorly done,’ thought Mrs Ingram. ‘I know he feels concerned about leaving me and may not like to mention it; but he will have to go in the end. He mustn’t be tied to my apron-strings for ever.’

‘Apron-strings’ had too homely a connotation altogether – Esmé and his mother were not just pottering cosily about a kitchen. So fine that they were invisible were the threads with which she drew him to her: it was by the most delicate influence that she had had him break off his long-ago engagement and had later tried to stop him from going abroad, though seeming all the time to speed him on his way. ‘I know that she sometimes does wrong,’ Catherine thought. ‘But I love her and I should be happy if she cared to dominate me, too.’ She had wanted to be her daughter-in-law and part of the enchantment. She and Noël would have lived nearby, and come often to the house. ‘The children are coming to luncheon,’ Mrs Ingram would say. Once, the summer before, Catherine, sitting out on the steps in front of the house, had heard Mrs Ingram in the hall, telephoning a friend. ‘Do come over. I shall be alone. The children are going to the cinema.’ Bliss
had flowed through Catherine. She had shut her eyes, feeling the sun, hearing the sounds of the garden – the birds and insects and the weir. Yes, it was bliss in those days, she thought, and she still sensed the magic of this quieter house, though the river was more melancholy to her and the family diminished and Mrs Ingram’s composure no longer completely holding.

Someone called Freddie began to be talked of – a friend of Esmé’s, a painter, of whose painting Mrs Ingram disapproved. She compared it unfavourably with Catherine’s. It had, she said, that detestable ingredient, virtuosity. ‘It allows one to see how clever he has been, and that should never be. I don’t want to see the wheels go round or to feel called upon to shout “Bravo”, as if he were some sweating Italian tenor. One should really feel, “How easy it must be! How effortless!” I should think – don’t you, Catherine? – that an artist must seem too proud to have tried, too careless to have thought of succeeding.’ Esmé said nothing, so Catherine could not judge if he agreed.

Freddie was expected for luncheon, but did not come.

‘Perhaps he didn’t feel hungry today,’ Mrs Ingram said.

So Freddie himself was out of favour along with his paintings, Catherine thought. Mrs Ingram had glanced at Esmé when she had spoken and his face betrayed him by its impassivity.

In the afternoon, Catherine made another attempt to paint, in a tangled part of the garden behind the old stables. In the shade, the nettles and docks were a dark and bitter green and this greenness seemed to tinge the curdy white flowers of elder and cow-parsley. She became gradually absorbed in the shapes and the textures of the leaves – the feathery, the ribbed and spade-like, the giant fern weighted down by a heavy snail. She was pleased with what she was doing and just painting in a bright poppy among the green and silvery green, for contrast, when she saw a snake lying on the path before her at the edge of the shade. It was green, too, of an olive-green to enhance her picture and in a curious way she realised this before she took fright, tiptoeing backwards away from it until she felt safe to turn and run.

She sped up the steps and into the hall, calling for Esmé, then the wonderful sunny slumbrance of the house checked her and she felt disconcerted. A young man came to the drawing-room door, saying, ‘I wanted Esmé, too.’

‘Oh, I am glad, for Esmé’s sake, that he came at last,’ thought Catherine, pulling up too suddenly and slipping on a rug.

‘Scatter-rugs they call these in America,’ said Freddie, coming to steady her. ‘A good name. I should like to scatter them all in the river.’

He seemed a very neat young man at a first glance. His suit exactly matched his fawn hair and his blue bow-tie matched his pullover and
socks. His voice and his Cockney accent were pert and gay, his small eyes very bright. A second impression revealed his bitten nails and dirty shoes and the fact that his slight build and his clothes made him seem more boyish than he was.

‘You sound as if you wanted Esmé in a great hurry,’ he said.

‘Yes, I saw a snake round by the stables and I think it is an adder.’

‘Isn’t there a gardener or something?’ Freddie asked, looking vaguely out at the terrace.

‘I just thought of Esmé first. I left all my painting things there.’

‘I shouldn’t think a snake would harm them. Did you want me to kill it or something?’ he asked reluctantly.

‘You see, I am sure they are deadly.’

‘Is that supposed to encourage me?’

He went into the back hall and chose a walking-stick from the umbrella-stand. ‘Oh, dear, this isn’t really up my street. I just hope it’s gone away by now. It would have been much better if you had asked a gardener.’

They set out towards the stables and he said: ‘My name is Freddie Bassett. I was expected to lunch. Was there much hard feeling?’

‘I am a guest. It isn’t for me to say.’

‘So there was! I ran out of petrol miles from anywhere. So what could I do?’

‘You could have telephoned, I suppose.’

‘Splendid! I knew I was right to try the story out on you first. You spotted the flaw as Mrs Ingram would have done. How can I get round that one? I telephoned, but the silly girl at the exchange said there was no reply. I don’t know what these girls are coming to.’

‘No one would believe you.’

‘Mrs Ingram will not dare to say so. All right, then, I lost my way.’

‘This way,’ said Catherine coldly, taking another path.

‘As a matter of fact, I did.’ He seemed surprised to find himself speaking the truth. ‘I stopped for a quick one and fell in with a little party. You know how that can be done – complete strangers, but something happens, there is some clemency in the smoke-haze, so that they seem the dearest companions one ever had, one almost weeps with gratitude that they are so sympathetic, so much one’s own sort. So helpful in helping one to forget anxiety. I could not tear myself away from them and now I have forgotten them and shall never see them again – only similar ones. When it was closing-time we stayed on, because the landlord was the same sort as well. I felt dreadfully guilty about Esmé and they were all so sympathetic and so full of condolences and advice about what his mother would say. They came out to see me off and wish me good luck. Then I took the wrong road.’

‘Wouldn’t it have been better not to have come at all?’

‘Surely not? I can stay to dinner instead.’

Catherine felt frightened. ‘I am not his accomplice,’ she thought. ‘It is nothing to do with me.’

‘Do you know when Esmé went out?’ he asked. ‘I want to say that I arrived the minute after.’

‘I didn’t know that he had gone.’

‘He has taken his mother to a meeting. I hope it is a nice long one and that my head will feel better before she comes back.’

They crossed the stables courtyard and Catherine peered through the archway at the path where her painting things were lying beside her folding stool.

‘Have I really got to?’ Freddie asked. ‘Oughtn’t I to be wearing puttees or something? I am sure it has kindly gone away.’

But the snake had only moved farther into the sun. Catherine shrank back and for some strange reason put her hands over her ears. ‘Oh, Lord!’ grumbled Freddie, going forward with the stick held high. Catherine stayed in the courtyard. She heard the stick beating the ground and Freddie swearing, but she would not look. When he came back, he was carrying the stool and the drawing-board and his face was white. ‘I take it you don’t want to go on with this at the moment,’ he said, handing her the unfinished water-colour without glancing at it. ‘I just left it there – the snake.’

‘You did kill it?’

‘Yes, I suddenly went mad with fear. It was a dreadful thing to ask someone from London to do. Are you the girl Noël was engaged to?’

‘We weren’t engaged.’

‘And now, I understand, Mamma wants you to marry Esmé?’

‘I think you are rude and absurd,’ Catherine said. ‘It is none of my business, but I don’t know how Esmé can tolerate you.’

She hurried on ahead of him and turned the corner of the house. There was Esmé walking on the lawn, his head down, his hands in his pockets. He paced up and down dejectedly. When he saw Catherine he smiled and then his smile warmed and he came forward eagerly, quite transformed by the sight of Freddie trailing behind, carrying the folding stool.