Friends and Lovers (45 page)

“Tell me about Inchnamurren,” she said.

And she knew by the way he talked so easily, telling her affectionately of the things she wanted to know, that he had decided for David and for her.

Chapter Thirty-four.

THE AGE OF GOLD.

David paid off the taxi, trying to appear nonchalant. Yes, this was the Square, this was the number. But as he stood looking at the house his heart beat with sudden unsteadiness, and his excitement, so controlled on the journey from Oxford, now mounted.

She won’t be home yet, he reminded himself. You are early.

A middle-aged, untidy woman with a stained apron covering her skirt came up from the basement to let him enter the hall. Third floor back,” she said.

She was too tired even to be curious. But he didn’t need the directions. He had imagined it a hundred times. He mounted the steep, narrow staircase, taking two or three steps at a time.

Then on the top landing, facing the door with its neatly printed card, looking at the name, he paused.

She won’t be home yet, he told himself again. For a moment, as he raised his hand to knock on the door, he had the cold fear that she wasn’t there and wouldn’t ever be, that the card with her name was a lie, that she had left and never would return. Then he heard her voice saying.

“One moment. Who is it?”

“David,” he answered. And she was there, as he remembered her. She wasn’t just a dream to soften a lonely night, to ease him into sleep.

She was there, and his arms were round her, and her hair had the same soft perfume, her skin had the same touch of silk.

“Oh, Penny.” He held her close and closer to him, straining the young soft, firm body against his, tightening his grip as if he would never let her go.

He kissed her again, feeling her arms round his neck, her lips answering his. Her eyes were shining.

It’s true, he thought, it is all true. He relaxed, loosening his grip on her waist, sliding his hands along her arms to grasp her hands. He stood back to look at her.

“Hello, my beautiful,” he said.

She laughed uncertainly, with a catch in her throat.

“Hello, darling,” she said, and she hid her face in his shoulder.

“Well, I hope it’s happiness,” he said half worriedly, half comically, and succeeded in making her laugh. He drew her towards the nearest armchair, pulled her gently on to his knee, and reached for a handkerchief.

“Blow hard,” he told her.

“That’s better.” But he was still worried.

“Now what was that all about?”

“I’m just happy, darling.” She was smiling now as she tucked the handkerchief back into the cuff of his sleeve.

“It hit me suddenly: I realized then how lonely I had been without you, David.”

He smoothed her hair with his cheek and tightened his arm round her waist as she tried to rise.

“Relax, darling. Let me enjoy myself,” he said.

“But, David, look at me! I haven’t finished dressing. We’ll be late.”

“So we shall.” But he made no move to release her. Her hair was loose as if she had been brushing it, and had not yet had time to comb it into place.

She wore a dressing-gown of some kind of dull, gleaming cloth, smooth to the touch. “So we shall,” David repeated firmly, and tightened his arm still more.

The concert?” Penny asked.

Two tickets were standing proudly on the mantelpiece. In Oxford, planning this evening, it had been an attractive idea to write, “Let’s have dinner at Giovanni’s; you shall wear your smartest dress.

And it might be an idea to try for tickets to that Queen’s Hall concert. I see Sargent is to conduct the Hoist, and I’ve always wanted to be with you when you first heard it. The London Choir is singing too; the effect should be astronomisch indeed.”

But now he wondered why he should ever have been so insane as to suggest any plans. They weren’t needed. Not with Penny. Just to be with her was plan enough. He kissed her hair and then the side of her brow, gently lifting her face so < that it turned upward to him, and his mouth followed the line of her cheek to her lips, resting there, owning them, declaring his love more fully than a thousand words could ever do. He felt her body stir gently in his arms, and his murmured name was lost in the long kiss.

They arrived at the concert at the end of the interval. (“The Planets are last on the programme, anyway,” David had said. “What is played first doesn’t usually matter. It is generally Oberon or Leonora No.

3. “) They raced into the Queen’s Hall, hand in hand, and then slackened their pace to a decorous walk down the aisle towards their seats. An excitement stirred in their blood which was not merely the sharing of the expectant tension around them. The crowd and the lights only emphasized their secret happiness. Penny’s eyes turned from the platform, with its massed array of musicians and singers, and gave a glancing smile. David bent to pick up the programme which had slipped from her lap, and his hand rested on her ankle for a moment.

She was smiling openly as she watched the conductor take his place, and then bent her head to study the programme notes.

David settled comfortably in his seat and prepared himself for the opening chords with their grim, relentless rhythm. The audience around him slumped into their self-chosen listening postures. Penny, sitting so quietly, unmoving, smiling no longer, stiffened in fear as the marching feet hammered into her emotions. Feel, the music said, feel what can destroy all happiness; hear what can be the end of all hope. And then, even at the height of its warning, the music relented, changed, slipped into the serene, long, descending chords of “Venus, the Bringer of Peace.” After the noise and the tumult it became the vague, shimmering beauty of repose, the last trembling note of happiness achieved.

David felt the music attack him as he had never been weakened by it before.

The muted chord, the liquid notes shivered down his spine.

His hand tightened gently round Penny’s, and he felt it tremble within his.

We have given each other this experience, he suddenly realized. In some strange way our minds and bodies are alive to every note, every change in tone, every breath and sigh in the music. The emotional and spiritual revelation each added to the other as the climax mounted. In this moment evil and ugliness were banished from the world. In this moment all thought and emotion were purified into absolute good.

For if such holy song Enwrap our fancy long, Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold.

Even when the choir’s voice, soaring in the music of the crystal spheres, the ninefold harmony, had died away into a silence as vast and living as that of eternity, they sat together quite motionless. It was the young man next to David who brought him back into the hall of shuffling feet, of sharp coughs, of surging applause.

“How did you like it?” the young man asked too loudly of his companion.

Perhaps he was unwilling to pass any judgment until he was sure how the other felt.

“Gay, but noisy,” his friend said, in the clipped, decided voice which never gave any right of appeal. The other man nodded in agreement and stopped applauding. Then they both rose, crushed their way across Penny and David, murmured the conventional but meaningless “Sorry,” and walked leisurely up the aisle. All need for haste was over now that they had made complete nuisances of themselves, David thought angrily. Certainly they had broken the spell. David looked at Penny, still silent, as they emerged into a world of honking taxis; jostling crowds; voices telling each other how marvelous it was, and by the telling losing something of the marvel; the smell of a warm city packed with human bodies and movement. The spell was broken. But the experience, felt so deeply, was his to be held and remembered.

“Hello, Bosworth,” a voice said out of the crowd. It was Marain with a strange young man. There were brief introductions. Marain, after a slight stare in the direction of Penny, seemed not to notice her. He turned all his attention on David. His companion remained quite silent, aloof from every one, perhaps even from himself.

“I hear you have been working hard,” Marain chided David, reminding him, too, that he had seen very little of Marain in the last few months. Marain would never admit that he did any work whatsoever.

David ignored the slightly amused smile, and said, “How did you find Germany? You were there at Easter, weren’t you?”

“There will be a revolution,” Marain said cheerfully.

“The people won’t stand for the present regime. Besides, the Ger-man Left is the best organized in Europe. Are you catching the train? We can share a taxi.” “I’m staying in town,” David said.

“Well, what about lunch some time next week? You haven’t abandoned all interest in politics, have you?” “No,” David said. He was thinking that this invitation was, after all, Marain’s way of offering an apology. For last month the magazine Experiment had died a natural death, and from the very causes that David and Marain had once quarrelled over. Breen’s father had at last found the solution to all the problems of his son. He had stopped paying any allowance, and Breen could no longer afford to play at being earnest. He was pushing a pen in an office for three pounds a week. In the evenings, so Margaret had reported, he was running up a good-attendance card at the nearest Oswald Mosley meeting-room, no doubt taking lessons in the manly sport of knuckle-dusting.

But Marain, quite unaware that David knew all about the trouble over Experiment, was speaking again.

“Good, good,” he was saying.

“Let’s say next Wednesday. I’ve an idea which we must talk over. There is no doubt that the Germans are damned suspicious of us. If we could make them understand that there is no reason to be, then the Nazis wouldn’t have a chance with their propaganda to the German people.”

“You mean with the myth that Germany is surrounded by enemies and must prepare to defend herself?”

“Exactly. But we all have to make some kind of gesture which will be publicized in every country. If we say that no young man in Britain is going to fight, then that will prove to every one, Germans included, that Hitler has absolutely no case.” “Will it?” David asked. He did not want to start discussing it now, anyway.

He made a remark about the concert, drawing Penny into the conversation.

But Marain went on, “Of course, it is only the germ of an idea, and it will take some time and a good lot of thought to work out. The Nazis will be cynical to suit their own purpose, but then the Nazis are not the German people.” “No?” David asked, looked at Penny, saw the expression in her eyes.

She knew instinctively what he thought about all this. He realized then how close they had come to each other, when even thoughts could be listened to as understandably as words.

The silent young man beside Marain stirred gently to say it was getting rather late … train …

“Wednesday,” Marain said. A slightly relaxed muscle in his face suggested a smile. And then he and his friend disappeared as quickly into the crowd as they had emerged from it.

“He didn’t like me,” Penny said, after she and David had walked some distance in silence. She was hurt. She wanted David’s friends to like her.

“Not that he gave me much of a chance. Or perhaps I should have been one of the German people.”

David laughed.

“You have more effect than you think, old girl. He did not have to talk to me tonight at all, you know. He could have come to see me in Oxford.”

“Why was he so rude, then? As if he resented me, as if I were an intruder.”

“He didn’t think he was being rude, and he probably could give two or three reasons why he ignored you like that, and none of them would be right. The true one he wouldn’t like to recognize at all. What do men feel, do you imagine, when they see a competitor with a pretty girl on his arm?

Especially if they don’t happen to know many pretty girls?”

“You always restore my vanity, darling. What would I do without you?”

“You’ve got that slightly wrong. You mean, what would I do without you? And the answer is Marain. That would have been me if I hadn’t met you.”

“No, David. You couldn’t ever be like that.” She was both horrified and amused.

*A year ago I was developing nicely into something closely resembling our friend Marain.” Then David smiled and said, “I had quite an escape, hadn’t I? If you had met me tonight for the first time, would you have disliked me as much as you disliked Marain?”

“If you had met me for the first time tonight, would you have ignored me?”

David laughed.

“I should have lost the train,” he admitted.

But she still wasn’t persuaded.

“I really am inadequate, David. About your work, I mean. And politics. I should be listening to you for hours—what you feel should be done about this or not done about that.” Yes, Marain had conveyed that quite clearly: David with a girl was less important than David as one of Marain’s circle.

“Heaven forbid,” David said, in genuine alarm.

“You’ve been reading the advice paragraphs on the woman’s page, all about sharing his interests,” he teased her. And then he added quietly. You do share mine, old girl. But we didn’t choose each other just to have suitable audience, you know. Later, when we are married and have each other day in, day out, I’ll probably begin to bore you with all my thoughts that are only argued out. Be careful, then, or I’ll start practising my speeches on you too. How would you like that?”

“I’d love it,” Penny said, and she did look as if she meant it. And that pleased him somehow, however much he had protested against it.

As they crossed over Oxford Street to follow the wide curve of Regent Street down towards Piccadilly Circus he said, with unexpected anger, “But damn Marain’s eyes. This was one night I didn’t want to think about politics and problems. I wonder if he sat through that concert only finding social significance, or lack of it, in the music.” He suddenly felt sorry for Marain. It was a new feeling, too. His annoyance left him then.

Penny said, “If it had not been Marain it would have been something else: those two young men who were in such a hurry to leave and then blocked up the entrance; or the street noises; or something.” She looked at the brightly lit red bus as it roared down the sweep of Regent Street. At this hour of night the pavements were less crowded, the shops were shut, the traffic was lighter.