Late and Soon (7 page)

He was oddly relieved to find no one downstairs except Jessica, still playing with her dog.

It was easy to make friends with Jess, and for her, as for the elderly ladies in the cocktail-bar, he deliberately accentuated Irish tone and idiom, in order to amuse her.

He took notice of the puppy, and listened to the explanation.of why she had been so oddly named.

“Ah, the little poor dog! Isn't that a shame, now!”

“What a frightfully good point of view. Most people think it's awful for old aunt Sophy — or would be, if she knew about it. Nobody has ever said it's a shame for a poor darling little puppy to be called after a cross old lady.”

“Have they not?”

“Not they,” said Jess. “Actually, I shall probably change her name later on or perhaps just call her Sophy. Otherwise it's a bit like those dim parents who give their children idiotic pet-names and will keep on with them for ever. I knew a person whose life at school was practically ruined because her mother came to see her and called her
Tiddles. I ask you — Tiddles.”

Lonergan expressed appropriate disapproval. He thought of asking her about her school but decided that she had too recently ceased to be a schoolgirl and said instead:

“I hear you're waiting to be called up for the WAAF?”

“That is correct. Did Primrose tell you?”

“She did.”

“I wouldn't have thought she'd be enough interested. It's funny, you knowing her first, and then coming down here.”

“Well, I was down here first, you know, for a few days and then I had to go to London for a special job and met her again,” said Lonergan, adding the last word as he remembered that Primrose had decided to credit them with an acquaintanceship of some months.

“And it's
much
odder,” said Jess, “that you should have met mummie all those thousands of years ago. She said she wondered if you were the same person when Buster — Lieutenant Banks — told us your name. And that reminds me, where's the other one?”

In spite of his preoccupation with the earlier part of her speech, Lonergan found that he understood to what she was so elliptically referring.

“Captain Sedgewick? He'll arrive after dinner, I expect. He had to go to Plymouth. Did he not let you know?”

“Oh, I expect so. I just hadn't heard, that's all. What's he like?”

“About twenty-three, with red hair, comes from some-where outside London. He's said to be a very good dancer.”

“Gosh, that's wizard,” thoughtfully returned Jess.

She gazed up at him with ingenuous admiration.

“You're frightfully good at describing people, aren't you?”

Lonergan laughed and was aware that her childlike praise had pleased his vanity.

Extraordinary, he reflected dispassionately, how he had never outgrown the desire to be liked. Sometimes he thought that this pressing need was so urgent within him that, on a final analysis, it provided the motive spring for his whole conduct of life.

Jess chattered on, cheerful and at ease.

The tap of the General's Crutches and his shuffling step sounded from behind Lonergan and he rose, and Jess reared herself to her feet in what seemed to be one supple, unbroken movement.

Valentine was with her brother.

She was in black and Lonergan noticed that the long fringes of the embroidered Chinese shawl round her shoulders became continually entangled in pieces of furniture as she moved. He saw the unhurried gestures with which she patiently disentangled them, again and again.

General Levallois, in whom Lonergan had immediately detected an emphatic but quite fundamental hostility directed against his nationality rather than against himself, made stilted conversation.

Jess said:

“Gosh, I'd better wash. Fancy, that makes poetry. Fancy me being a poet!”

As she dashed her way upstairs, the eyes of Rory Lonergan and Valentine Arbell met, and they both laughed.

He told himself that he had never seen any woman's face alter so completely as hers did when she was really amused. Already, he felt, he knew that her pretty, not infrequent smile had nothing to do with amusement and was one of her many unconscious concessions to the traditions of her upbringing.

“I know that much about her,” thought Lonergan, assenting aloud to a proposition of the General's. And
immediately another thought followed.

“I know that, and how much more!”

The watcher in him, that was never off guard and could never be silenced, added the note that carried to him a familiar, never-to-be-mistaken warning, terrifying in its very brevity.

“I'm sunk.”

“… though mind you, I'm not denying that the feller had some reason on his side, up to a point,” said the General.

And Lonergan, unaware of having heard the beginning of the phrase, found that he knew it was de Valera of whom the General was talking.

He had heard far too many Englishmen launch themselves, with an ignorance almost sublime in its unconsciousness, upon the subject of Irish politics to feel any dismay.

He was quite prepared to let General Levallois have his head.

But Valentine, it seemed, was not.

“Where is your home, in Ireland?” she enquired, shelving de Valera and the General alike, by the directness of the enquiry and of the look that she turned on her guest.

“My home, for a good many years past, has been in Paris. I came over here two years before the war and lived in a flat in Fitzroy Square.”

“With a studio,” said Valentine, and he admired the deftness with which she was making his exact standing in the London world clear to General Levallois, to whom such classification would obviously be of relative, although in this case not intrinsic, importance.

“How you must have hated leaving Paris. Though, two years before the war, one didn't imagine what was going to happen to France.”

“It's an extraordinary thing about the French—” said the General.

The French, so gently introduced by Valentine, slid into the place of the Southern Irish.

Lonergan assented, dissented where it would obviously be easy for the General to prove that his dissent was founded on inadequate knowledge, and felt that he had known Coombe, and all that made up existence there, for years.

It actually gave him a sense of shock when Primrose came into the hall, at her most slouching pace, three minutes after dinner had been announced.

What had she to do, he almost asked himself, with these surroundings?

She belonged to a background of Bloomsbury flats, always untidy and generally dirty, hot and crowded bars — parties that reeked of smoke, intellect, blasphemy, love-making — and the dark interiors of rattling taxis and motor-cars.

Yet, except for her make-up, she did not really look out of place at Coombe, he had to acknowledge it.

She still wore her dark-blue travelling-dress and, divorced from the blue coat, it revealed itself as straight and simply-cut, with sleeves that stopped short above the elbows and a collar of which she had pulled down the zip fastener so as to show her long neck and small, delicate collar-bones.

She looked once at Lonergan — it was a look that revealed nothing at all beyond forcing him to observe that she never looked directly at anybody else — and did not speak until they were seated, cold, and apprehensive of further cold, in the dining-room.

“I thought there was a Captain Sedgewick,” she said.

“Captain Sedgewick telephoned to say he wouldn't arrive much before nine o'clock,” Valentine said.

“He's gone to Plymouth,” announced Jess. “Sorry I'm late.” She slid into her seat. “What were all those special exercises and things that all your men were doing yesterday?” she asked Lonergan.

He replied, with a number of reservations, and was surprised by the extent of her knowledge and understanding of the activities of some portion at least of the British Army in war-time.

He liked Jess, and was pleased that she presently subsided and left the conversation to her elders, with an absence of self-assertion that Lonergan thought well suited to her youth. General Levallois looked at the menu-card, — Good God, a menu-card, thought Lonergan whose views of the catering at Coombe were already of the lowest description — muttered something that was inaudible but clearly and deservedly uncomplimentary about the cooking — and talked, to himself rather than to anybody else, about the state of agriculture.

Lonergan was prepared to look as though he were listening and to make all the necessary rejoinders, but he found that Valentine could give what he recognized with some astonishment as being a genuine attention to the General's monologue although from sheer lack of imagination he made whatever he talked about seem uninteresting.

Once or twice Valentine appealed to Primrose, and once she brought the conversation round to the London background with a direct question, but she got no response.

Primrose let fall some sounds — they seemed hardly even to be recognizable syllables — from the corner of her mouth and pushed her plate away, the food on it left almost untouched.

“I can't hear a word you're saying, Primrose,” remarked the General. “Why don't you speak up?”

Primrose made no reply whatever and Valentine, speaking gaily, said:

“You're very difficult, Reggie dear. You tell Jess not to scream because you can't hear a word she's saying, and now you tell poor Primrose to speak up, for the same reason.”

At that Primrose, for the first time, looked her mother full in the face.

“For God's sake don't start standing up for me, there's nothing I loathe more, or need less.”

The sense of shock imposed by the tone in which she spoke, no less than by the words themselves, kept them all silent for an ice-cold second.

Then Jess, in a high key, began an exclamatory” I must say—” checked by her mother's low, distinct voice.

“Very well, Primrose darling,” said Valentine — and there was even something in her tone that hinted at a smile.” I won't stand up for you if you'd rather I didn't. “She turned her head towards Lonergan and went on with exactly the same placidity.

“Why does one generation always accuse the next one of speaking indistinctly? An ear-trumpet can't be the sole solution.”

“I'd be sorry to think so,” he agreed, with such lightness of tone as her own had been. “Otherwise I'd be looking for an ear-trumpet myself. Not that I believe people use them now, unless it's on the stage. My poor sister Nellie, who's very deaf indeed, has a most peculiar little invention.”

He went on to describe it.

Valentine listened, commented, General Levallois asked in what part of Ireland Lonergan's sister lived, and, on being told that it was in the South, was immediately moved to put what he described as a question but what was, in reality, an embittered series of condemnations.

The bad moment was over — averted. Lonergan could have told the precise instant at which Valentine, gently unplaiting the fringes of her shawl from the arm of her chair, let the tide of pain that Primrose had loosed, rise within her. It was not a sharp, violent pain, he felt it must be too familiar for that. Rather must it be the recurrence of some deep-rooted misery that twisted in her
heart and against which she had long ceased to rebel because rebellion was so useless.

He wondered very much at the skill with which she had handled that brief, intolerable minute of tension.

Was it just part of a social training that instinctively served her and would always serve her, or was it one way of protecting herself from facing a bitter truth? Did she always oppose the smooth, unreal self-effacement of the super-civilized to the onslaught of real emotion?

“There's a great deal in what you say, sir,” he assured the General. “At the same time, Dev has done quite a lot for his own people according to his lights. I could tell you of instances—”

He noticed, with a pleasure that he felt to be rather irrational, that Valentine was not now seeking, as she had sought earlier in the evening, to avert the General's foolish spate of assertions and counter-assertions on the subject of Ireland.

She was leaving Lonergan to deal with them, taking for granted his ability to do so without discomfiture to himself—for she would never, he felt certain, run the risk of allowing a stranger to endure discomfiture.

He and she, however, were most certainly not strangers.

On that conviction, Lonergan let his analysis of the situation rest temporarily.

When dinner was over, and they had moved out of the cold dining-room to the comparative warmth of the hall, Primrose said to him curtly:

“Have you seen the room that's supposed to be your office?”

“Yes. I saw it for a minute before dinner. It seems charming.”

“The fire is laid there,” said Valentine, “if you'd like to use it to-night. Please do, if you want to.”

“Thank you very much. Perhaps later on.”

He found himself looking at her, gravely and with attention, and averted his gaze with a conscious effort.

It met, for once squarely and fully, a look from Primrose who was standing behind her mother.

She signalled to him, briefly and competently with a backward jerk of the head, that he should seek the little breakfast-room now to be his office, and that she would join him there.

Lonergan slightly shook his head. He gave her at the same time what he himself had candidly described to more than one lady of his intimate acquaintance as “a look that's as good as a declaration”, with narrowed, smiling eyes and an almost imperceptible movement of the lips.

He wished, at the moment, neither to humiliate her nor to let her think that he had been antagonized by her behaviour at dinner.

It was not possible to tell how she reacted inwardly to his refusal. Her face remained a mask, with its look of embittered discontent that gave the impression of having been painted on.