Late and Soon (15 page)

He had never felt her nearer to him, for he had never felt her to be more completely sincere. She was generous, too, for she might well have reproached him — as indeed
he wished that she would. But she had accepted what he said, although without understanding it, and had not even pressed home the inevitable questions.

And she had, most uncharacteristically, admitted that she had grown fond of him.

Rory, in despair, could only groan “Primrose!” as he kissed her again and again.

“Is it all right, pet?” she muttered.

“No, darling, it is not. I think you're wonderful, but I can't be your lover any more.”

Primrose disengaged herself and stood up.

“I think you're a dam' fool, that's all. I've told you once, in plain English, that I'm ready to go on as we are for this week. After all, it's what I came down here for, isn't it? But I certainly shan't say it a second time. It's now or never, Rory.”

“Then, my dear, it's never.”

She turned rather white but answered coolly.

“Okay. Now we know where we are. I shall probably go back to London to-morrow as I suppose you're stuck here now — thanks to my own efforts, which seems a bit ironical — and I hope this marvellous new love of yours gives you the hell you deserve.”

She turned and went to the door.

As she opened it the shrill note of the telephone-bell rang through the house.

They heard someone crossing the hall to go and answer it, and both automatically moved forward and then stood waiting, not looking at each other.

Valentine came towards them, from the door that concealed both the telephone and the entrance to the downstairs lavatory.

“It's a London call for you, Primrose.”

“Okay.”

Valentine pushed the silvered lock of hair away from her forehead. She looked tired and nervous and Lonergan felt a passionate desire to reassure and comfort her.

“What's Jess done with the British Army?” he asked, instinctively putting before her the recollection of so much youth and normality.

“They're still upstairs, I suppose, with Madeleine. Unless they've all gone to the schoolroom — but I hope not, it's so cold in there.”

There was an unusual note of nervousness in her voice, and he saw her tired eyes and mouth.

“I'd like to talk to you, if I may,” he said abruptly. “Are you too tired, now?”

“No, but haven't you and Primrose — aren't you talking to her?”

“We've said all we have to say. She was just going.”

“I thought she came out because she heard the telephone. It's nearly always for her.”

“Yes, I see.”

The words fell from their lips, meaningless for both of them.

Other words were crowding Lonergan's mind and causing his heart to thud heavily against his side.

He could hear Valentine's quickly-drawn breathing.

“I think I must go,” she said at last. “I ought to see about—”

Her voice trailed away into silence.

Lonergan stepped forward quickly and took both her hands.

“Ah, don't go. Valentine, don't ever go away. I love you so much.”

He saw, with shattering clarity, the look of pure, incredulous happiness that illuminated her face on the instant as she gazed full at him.

“But do you?” she asked in a breathless, shaken voice. “Are you sure?”

Exultant joy and relief rushed over him.

“It's a pity I wouldn't be sure, when we fell in love all those years ago in the Pincio Gardens! Darling, darling — do you love me too?”

“Yes.”

They looked at one another as though not daring to move for fear of breaking a spell.

Then she said his name, gendy and lingeringly as if experimenting with her right to say it.

“Rory.”

“Valentine! Love.”

He drew her towards him, forgetting everything except her nearness, and said to her — reverting unaware to the long-disused idiom of his youth:

“Ah — c'mon while I tell you!”

Sloping her length against the wall, a cigarette in one hand and the telephone-receiver in the other, Primrose drawled rejoinders into the mouthpiece, replying to the nervous, high-pitched tones that reached her from a disembodied masculine voice in London.

“Primrose, are you all right? Are you having a decent rest?”

“I'm okay.”

“Are you — are you liking it better than you expected? Anyone with you besides family?”

Primrose knew what that too casual-seeming enquiry meant. Jealous fool, she thought, made furious as she always was at a hint that anyone — and in particular Hughie Spurway — had any claim upon her.

“We've got some Army chaps billeted here,” she said coolly. “Colonels and what-have-you. So that's cheering things up a bit.”

“Is Lonergan one of them?”

“He is, my pet. I'd forgotten you knew him.”

“I met him when you did. Look here, Primrose, I really rang up — well, partly to hear your voice, and partly because I've got a man to see at Plymouth and I wondered if I could meet you anywhere. I could drive you back to London if you liked.”

“When?”

“I can make my dates fit in with yours.”

She could hear the hysterical eagerness in Hughie Spurway's voice. It irritated her, just as it had always irritated her ever since she had realized, nearly a year ago, that he had fallen frenziedly in love with her and that the worse she treated him, the more deeply fixed his infatuation became.

“Look here, Hughie, I'll have to let you know. ‘S'matter of fact, I've rather been debating getting back to London.”

“I can come and get you any day you like.”

“For the matter of that, I can take a train.”

“As you say, of course, but travelling's pretty foul, this weather. Primrose, have you had any letters from me?”

“Plenty.”

“I know you loathe writing, my sweet, but you did say you would.”

“Did I?”

“God, Primrose, why do you say you'll do a thing and then you never do? You don't know what it does to me.”

“Don't be a fool. Look, I'm going to ring off. You'll be ruined.”

“I'm ruined already. But it's as you say. Only let me know which day to come, because I must let the Plymouth people know.”

“Okay. If you
don't
hear, you'll know I can't make it.”

“Primrose, for God's sake — I've
got
to see you.”

“You will, when I get back.”

“When can you dine with me? Can't we fix an evening now? I want to talk to you. I can't go on like this.”

His voice held the desperate note that Primrose at once dreaded and despised.

“Forget it, Hughie. I loathe hysterics, as you know — they make me sick. I'm going to ring off.”

“No —wait. Don't. I've
got
to—”

“'Night, Hughie.” She hesitated for a second and added: “Good-night, pet.”

Then she quickly replaced the receiver.

Hughie had rung up for nothing really. He just wanted to make the same old scene, over and over again.

He couldn't understand, apparently, that when one was through with a thing, one was through with it. Nothing could bring it to life again.

God, thought Primrose wearily, I suppose that's what Rory feels about us — him and me. Funny, when you come to think of it, because I've always been the one who got sick of it first, before.

Her cigarette finished, she threw it on the tiled floor and stamped it out.

The telephone bell rang again.

That was Hughie. He always did that. If she answered, he'd say that he'd simply got to hear her voice again — he couldn't leave it at that — he
must
speak to her.

But she wasn't going to answer.

Hughie was neurotic, and exacting and jealous, and hopelessly on her nerves. She wished she'd told him to get himself released from his B.B.C. job and go into one of the Services. If he did wangle a journey to Plymouth and she let him drive her back to London, she'd say just exactly that to him, thought Primrose savagely.

Weary, cold and exasperated she leaned against the wall, furious with herself as well as with Hughie Spurway, and anxious to believe that she was still more furious with Lonergan for letting her down.

And who the devil was this new girl of his?

Primrose recalled the names of girls whom they both knew, but her acquaintance with Lonergan was so recent that she could only think of one or two.

It's someone I don't know, she decided. Somebody either in Bloomsbury, who goes in for being artistic, or some awful woman in the suburbs that he's fallen for without any reason whatever. Just one of those
things.
And he's such a fool, he's gone off the deep end and taken it as deadly serious. God, he might even marry her — unless she's got a husband who won't divorce her. Though for all I know, he's married already — why not? He's exactly the kind of lunatic who'd marry at twenty and then walk out and never pull himself together and get rid of his wife. Artists and such. … I'm well out of it.

She knew she didn't believe that, even while she tried to think it. Rory Lonergan had attracted her at sight, and she found his intelligence in love-making agreeable and exciting. To her, it furnished quite a new experience. It pleased her, also, that he was articulate and told her things about herself that were never stereotyped and that made her, she thought, sound nicer than she really was.

She reflected drearily: If Rory isn't married, perhaps that's why he's dropped me. He wants to marry this bitch whoever she is. He said: If it's what I believe it to be — everything else is out. I wish I'd made him tell me. I still can. I needn't go back to London to-morrow. In fact, I don't actually want to, if he's here. I suppose I'm bats, but that's the way I feel.

Amazed, and angry with herself as well as with Lonergan, Primrose still stood in the cold little cupboard of a room, contemplating without seeing them the polished surfaces of her pointed nails.

She had never before felt so undecided, so profoundly at a loss.

She was unable even to decide whether she would or would not return to London next day

At last she walked away, still undetermined, and went back to the hall.

Jess and the soldiers were there, Banks and Olliver regretfully protesting that the time had come for them to leave.

“They've thought up a lovely plan for keeping us all out of mischief to-morrow,” explained Banks gloomily, “and it begins at five in the morning.”

“We rely on you, Jess, to see that Charles leaves this house in good time,” Jack Olliver added.

“Oh, is he in it too?”

“He's in it too.”

“It
being a sopping wet ditch on the moors, presumably,” said Sedgewick.

“The moors! You'll have to go miles!”

“How right you are.”

Jess took her two young men to the hall door, whistling to the puppy.

“Come on, aunt Sophy!”

Primrose saw that only Charles Sedgewick was really aware of her presence. He had looked once in her direction, quite expressionlessly, out of sharp, bright, red-brown eyes.

“Is Rory in his office?” she asked, instinctively showing him that she had another man in whom to be interested.

“Probably. He generally works late. But as a matter of fact I've not seen him since we came down.”

“Where's mummie, Primrose? They want to say goodbye and thank you for having me, like they ought,” Jess said.

“I haven't the slightest.”

“I'll say it for you,” Jess volunteered to the subalterns. “Or she may come when she hears the motor-bike starting up.”

“We shall be half-way down the drive by then. We go like the wind.”

Jess threw open the door and a gust of cold air swept in.

“Gosh! It's suddenly got freezing again. How utterly dim!”

“Dim is the word all right,” called out the voice of Olliver, as they moved out into the darkness and Jess let the glass doors swing behind them.

They did not shut out the abrupt, volcanic noises of the motor-bicycle, as the engine started, stopped, started and stopped again.

“What a row,” Primrose muttered.

Sedgewick said:

“Shall I go and give them a shove?” and looked again at Primrose.

The door of the little breakfast-room opened.

Primrose saw her mother come out as well as Lonergan.

“They wanted to say good-night, Lady Arbell,” Sedgewick politely explained.

“I didn't know they were going so soon.”

“They're not gone yet, by the sound of it,” Lonergan observed.

He moved, just behind his hostess, to the front door.

“Keep the glass doors shut, Primrose,” said her mother, “or the light will show when we open the hall door.”

Primrose glanced at her quickly, catching a new note in her voice.

Mummie simply never
told
her to do things, like that — she knew better. One wasn't Jess, after all.

But she shut the glass doors, retiring into the hall, and found that Sedgewick had remained with her.

“A very jolly evening,” said the Captain, pensively rather than enthusiastically.

“Oh yeah? Well, you've seen us all now. How do you think you'll be able to stand your new billet?”

“I think I'm lucky.”

“That's frightfully polite. So long as you don't mind
no heating, and bad cooking and uncle Reggie's grousing and grumbling, and mummie's generally dim outlook, you'll do fine. Jess will be off any day now and I'm probably going back to London to-morrow.”

“For all I know we may all be off ourselves tomorrow,” said Sedgewick imperturbably. “We get shoved around quite a lot.”

“I'll say you do.”

She knelt down to warm her hands at the fire.