Friends and Lovers (13 page)

“Most touching,” Moira said very coldly. And then she stared.

“Are you ill?” the Italian asked anxiously.

“No.” She made the effort of giving him a reassuring smile, which he interpreted m all the wrong way. She said, “We are very late. We must hurry.”

“Yes?” the Italian asked hopefully, as he steadied her by || the arm once or twice and she didn’t even notice. But it turned out that they were only late for tea, and his charming

S3.

blonde iceberg was surrounded once more by the phalanx of tedeschi, who were still discussing the view, the Italian wondered, was a view without a pretty girl to share it sympathetically ?

Moira found her conversational powers more strained than ever at the tea-table. Her feet felt like burning lead, and her mind kept asking questions. The only answers it found didn’t soothe her. Yes, that had been David Bosworth with Penny. And in full view of the whole city, as it were.

Just wait until I get home, Moira thought angrily, and her annoyance turned to outraged virtue. She ate one of her favourite cream-filled chocolate eclairs with as much pleasure as if it had been made of linoleum.

Chapter Ten.

THE END IS ALWAYS GOODBYE.

“Time to leave,” David said. And then he looked at Penny and added, “Of course, I could easily miss this train. Then you might have dinner with me.

Would you?” “I couldn’t,” Penny said slowly.

“I promised that I would be home for dinner.”

“I suppose it would be tactless to ‘phone up and say you weren’t coming.” He hadn’t asked it as a question, but he was watching her face for a reply.

“All right, then,” he said.

“Time, gentlemen, time.”

They began walking very slowly down the steep Castle road.

“I’ll come home with you first,” David said.

“I’ll find a taxi.”

“I don’t think so, David. Not here. And we haven’t very-much time left, have we?” She turned back the cuff of his jacket and glanced at his watch, and then she shook her head. She smiled up at him this time, and said,

“Besides, I travel about Edinburgh every day by myself. I am not quite such a wilting lily as all that!” Then, as he didn’t join in her laugh, didn’t smile, didn’t say anything, but just stood still looking at her, she said quickly, anxiously, “What’s wrong, David?”

“Nothing,” he said then, ‘nothing.” She likes me, he thought; she really likes me. She wouldn’t have done that if she hadn’t liked me. Damned fool, he told himself, how do you know she wouldn’t? You only want to believe that; you don’t know a damned thing about any of her gestures, how much or how little they mean.

“Penny,” he said suddenly, and then stopped himself in time. Penny, will you write to me, he had been going to say. Better not ask it sounded pretty silly, anyway. Better write to her, and then see if she answered his letter.

“Yes?”

“It is Penny, isn’t it? Not Penelope? Why?” “I don’t like Penelope,” she said.

“I mean, I like it as a name, but I don’t like it being attached to me.

People make jokes about it, you see: they make it rhyme with antelope, or they think up funny things to say about it. I wish they wouldn’t. They ruin names, don’t they?”

“They do their best. I’ve often thought that Dr. Johnson was wrong: puns aren’t the lowest form of wit. Making jokes on names is quite the easiest and silliest way to raise a laugh.”

“We should all be given numbers to identify us until we reach the age of eighteen. Then we could choose the name we really wanted. It is pretty awful at times what parents will think up for the christening.”

“Probably they are thoroughly desperate and bewildered by that time,” David suggested.

“Anyway” he looked at her with a smile as he paused ‘anyway. Penny it is.”

She smiled. And then she said, in surprise, “Look, we are walking in the wrong direction! The station is up to our left.”

“Is it?”

She wasn’t quite sure if he had been trying to lose that train after all.

She coloured, and looked quickly away.

“I expect your mother will hold it against me if I don’t take you home safely,” he tried. I’d even risk the horrors of a family dinner if I could see her for four more hours, he thought.

“Mother won’t know. She is at the clinic this afternoon, weighing other people’s babies and telling them how to feed them.”

“Is your mother a doctor?” he asked, with amazement.

“No. It’s voluntary work. Mother and some of her friends have been doing that for years.”

Lady Bountiful, David thought. I might have guessed that. Still, Mrs. Lorrimer deserved some credit for the will to make an effort: there were those who were rich and never even thought of the poor at all.

“You aren’t very impressed,” Penny said, watching his face carefully.

“Don’t you like good works?”

“They are useful in an emergency. And as far as they go.” David said carefully.

“But volunteers can be–-” *I know,” he said.

“They have hearts of gold, and they give up their time, and what would we do without them? And it doesn’t matter that the birth-rate is low where it should be high, and high where it should be low, or that so many people should be stunted physically and mentally. You would think it would be cheaper in the long run for a state to spend money on professional people to take over everything to do with health. Besides, the volunteer basis doesn’t reach far enough. If we depend on people who volunteer to help, then only some of those who need help will volunteer to ask for it. But if it is on a professional basis, then people learn to be businesslike about it, and they’ll ask for help knowing it is legally theirs and not a matter of charity.”

“But–-” Penny began again. She looked at the strange bitterness in his face, and she felt suddenly bewildered and unhappy.

He shook his head.

“No,” he said more gently, ‘let’s not begin anything we can’t finish. Penny.

I’ll argue with you, if you’d like that, when you come to visit me at Oxford. You will come, won’t you?

We’ll have lunch at the George, and then we shall walk out to the Trout for tea. Will you come?”

“I’d love to,” Penny said. It did sound wonderful, although she wondered what on earth the George and the Trout could be.

“That’s settled, then.” He sounded pleased. He was, indeed, relieved: he had been worrying how to phrase that invitation for the last fifteen minutes, and for the last fifteen seconds before she had answered he had been afraid of a polite little reply promising nothing.

Then something began to happen to their conversation. They were practically silent by the time they reached the station. They halted at its entrance, Penny pretending to be absorbed in the busy street, David studying the pavement at their feet. He was thinking with some disappointment that this might be as far as the well-brought-up girl could go, and he had better not break any more taboos by suggesting that she should come into the station and see him off. She was waiting for him to say, in that easy way of his, “Why are we standing here?” But he didn’t suggest that she should come into the station, and he seemed quite immovable. His silence made him suddenly appear remote. He is halfway to London already, she thought, and in London we shall probably meet again as strangers.

Probably, too, she would never see either this George or the Trout, whatever they were. That was another world—his world. He had come into hers for a day, because he had been passing by, and because it had pleased him. For a day. She watched the hurrying people on the street, noticing neither their faces nor their clothes. She felt miserable.

This is the anticlimax, David thought. Goodbyes were always depressing affairs. You said either too much or too little. And afterwards you thought of all the things you should have said, which would have been just right, neither too much nor too little.

He roused himself to say very quickly, “Well, thank you, Penny. Tell your mother that I think. Edinburgh is a lovely, lovely place.” “Goodbye,” she said. Well, here it was … First you said goodbye, and then perhaps goodbye again, and you kept using the same phrases as you held out your hand.

“Goodbye.” He took her hand.

“I hope I wasn’t a nuisance.”

“Oh, no!” She looked up at him.

“I’ve had a marvelous day.” She said it as if she meant it, he hoped. He still held her hand. Damned if I don’t kiss her in front of the whole ruddy town, he thought. But then, at that moment, a stranger’s shoulder rubbed him, and a stranger’s voice said, “Sorry!” and then, “Good afternoon. Miss. Lorrimer!”

David dropped Penny’s hand, raised his hat, smiled and said, “Well .

“Goodbye, David.”

“Goodbye, Penny.”

She gave him one of her brightest smiles, and then turned to walk quickly away. He watched her. The worst thing about saying goodbye, he decided, was this feeling of uncertanty. Would he ever see her again? For that depended on her too.

The man who had greeted her was waiting at the corner. ostensibly for the traffic to slacken pace. Then he looked round and saw Penny (as David knew damned well he would), and changed his mind about crossing the road. He was accompanying her towards Princes Street instead.

David lost sight of them in the crowd. He swore under his breath and went into the station.

He bought a newspaper to read in the train, and disagreed savagely with the leader and every article in it.

Then he sat in the gathering dusk and watched the fields flow past his window, and wondered gloomily just what had happened to him. By the time he had reached York he wasn’t even bothering to wonder. He was trying to balance a sheet of paper on a book and make his writing legible. This letter was going to be posted, he told himself grimly.

Chapter Eleven.

THOUGHTS AT MIDNIGHT.

There was an air of distraction about the Lorrimer household that evening.

Betty had come home from visiting her friend, bringing a sore throat and headache. Mrs. Lorrimer, already feeling rather sorry for herself after a particularly trying afternoon at the clinic, retired to her own room with a tray and a novel. Moira had ‘phoned to say that there was some international dinner which she must attend; she would be home by ten o’clock probably.

Charles Lorrimer, worried by Betty, annoyed by Moira, upset by the empty dinner-table, finished the sweet as quickly as possible, refused dessert, and, when Penny poured coffee for him in the drawing-room, found an excuse to go to his study. Penny watched her father march with his long, heavy stride across the hall. He was a tall man, broad-shouldered and erect, so that his six feet seemed taller still. He knew that, and never slouched. Each sign of age distressed him the spectacles which he now must have for reading, the careful diet which he was supposed to follow for stomach ulcers. How awful to get old. Penny thought, but she was pitying her father and not herself: when you are nineteen it is difficult to imagine that old age can happen to you. Somehow you believe that one day you will at last reach the nice satisfactory age of twenty-five, and that you will stay that way always.

Penny felt pity for a full minute. And then she picked up the book which David had given her. He had written her name on the fly-leaf.

Just her name. That was all. I like his handwriting, she thought. She looked at it critically, holding the book out at arm’s length, her head to one side as her eyes studied it for a moment. Handwriting was so often disappointing: it didn’t match the person who wrote it, or, at least, you hadn’t thought this was the way they would write.

She carried David’s book upstairs to her room. The house was at rest.

She listened to its silence for a moment at her door, and then she went into her bedroom with a feeling of contentment and satisfaction.

She had peace to think, peace to remember. She would take a long time in getting ready for bed, and she would think and remember and relax in comfort.

No one asking questions. No one talking about things which didn’t interest her tonight.

She undressed and slipped on a quilted dressing-gown, for the night breeze from the open window was cool, and padded downstairs in her white fur moccasins over the thick carpets to the bathroom on the floor below. She had a long bath, with two squares of jasmine bath-salts crumbled into the water as a gesture of extravagant luxury. Back in her own room again, she brushed her hair (and decided to let it grow longer: much more romantic), tied it with sea-blue ribbon to match her nightgown, and even read ten pages of her new book.

Then Moira arrived. She looked tired and angry. Probably Father had had a thing or two to say.

“There’s a draught,” Penny said, looking pointedly at the |t billowing red-and-white-striped curtains. Moira came in and closed the door.

“Had a good time?” “Rotten,” Moira said. She sat down on a chair with more relief than grace.

“Nothing but stairs and steps and stairs all day. Edinburgh was not built for sightseeing.”

“Couldn’t you get away earlier than this?”

“Some one had to look after them. Joan Taylor just disappeared with the Americans.” Moira looked angrily at her sister’s amused face.

“If your legs and feet felt the way mine do you wouldn’t think it was so funny either.”

“Was there a dance after dinner?”

“If you can call it that. A Frenchman sat down at the piano and gave us “Ie jazz hot.” And then I was pump-handled all over the floor, or given a demonstration in the crouch style.” “Never mind,” Penny said soothingly.

“It may have been trying for your feet, but it is awfully good experience for Geneva—when you get there.”

“At this moment,” Moira said, “I don’t want to see Geneva ever. I’ve no international understanding left.”

Penny rose now and came forward to her sister.

“Come on,” she said.

“Better get to bed. I’ll run a bath for you, and you can use my bath-salts.”

Moira didn’t move.

“If you have left any,” she said crossly.

“The whole place simply reeks with jasmine. Besides, I didn’t come in here totell you about how tired I am. I’ve a question or two to ask you.

Just how. Miss. Lorrimer, do you get away with it?”