Sunflower (20 page)

Cornelliss swung round again, and remained before them for an instant exhibiting the expression of one who sees a joke perfectly but must not see it because it would be bad form to do so. She did wonder what she had said. Then he picked up her eyes again for a second, let them go, and said to the company, ‘Goodbye. I shall be out in the morning about eleven.’ He made a sweeping bow; and when he was in the doorway, black against the blue dusk, he turned round and bowed again.

Harshly, violently, with the air of a man who throws something away from him for the sake of hearing it smash, Francis Pitt exclaimed, ‘That was for you, Miss Fassendyll! He cut that caper to show you that he’s a damn good figure for a man of fifty-three. My God, Etta, got on with it. These people will be thinking I asked them for breakfast tomorrow.’

The two women went on together, padding softly, talking in undertones, like temple servants.

‘This must mean an awful lot of work for you,’ said Sunflower sympathetically.

‘Oh, it’s beyond anything. If only he’d eat, I shall have him on my hands next. They
encourage
themselves to get upset, don’t they? And he won’t eat a thing.’

‘Well, you know, I found in the war that they’re apt to eat better if you cut out the little things. Soup and that. Just get straight to a nice piece of sole, or if they’re very tired, right on to the chicken. Then they start with what they like.’

‘I’ll try that…’

At last he was sitting at the head of his table. Surely nothing in the world could prevent them all being together for the next hour or so. Satisfied, she leaned back in her chair, smiling at the Victorian pattern of heavy gilt frames, thick bell-ropes, fringed damask curtains, and coarsely gleaming red woods that made the shadows of the dimly lit room seem like a sort of dust in the air, so close was the link in one’s mind between such furniture and dust. Now she understood why he lived in this queer house. That spurt of feeling in the hall gave away the secret. Francis Pitt had been shocked when Cornelliss had showed off in front of her, as a schoolboy would be if he caught out his father taking undignified trouble to catch the eye of a mere schoolgirl. He was thinking of Cornelliss as a child thinks of a grown-up. In fact he was one of those people who cannot realise that they are adult, who feel themselves as children playing truant from the nursery and fear they may be clapped back there at any time with punishments for all the damage they have done while trespassing in the grown-up world. Houses and furniture were things that grown-ups always control, so he had felt frightened about meddling with them; he had doubtless painful memories of a day when he had painted the grandfather clock with robin’s egg enamel. So rather than initiate a house he had taken this preposterous place, which had the sanction of having been arranged by a grown-up. Probably this childishness accounted too for the excess of flowers which here clotted to a sweet-scented extreme, covering the whole table save where the places were laid with a trough of many-coloured carnations. It must be the realisation of some childish promise that when he was grown-up he would never get mean as grown-ups are and unable to use their power to order as much as they want of the really good things in life; so might a little boy, left by accident in charge of his home, order twice as much ice-cream as his mother usually did. Wishing she could tease him about it all, she turned towards him with a smile; and was appalled by the sallow, tear-riddled gargoyle of his face. Again she had that fantasy of his grief as poison in a wound. She saw the wound as a dark fleck on his shoulder: she imagined dropping her lips to it and sucking, sucking, till he was whole. A tremor passed through her. He could not have seen her, for his eyes were nearly closed, but at that moment a tremor ran through him also. He hid his face with his hands as if to shut out something and grumbled behind that screen: ‘Thank God you people are here tonight …’

Essington raised his glass as soon as it was filled. ‘To poor dear Hurrell,’ he said. From the wistful cantankerousness of his voice she knew his eyes were wet. Mechanically she pointed out to herself that people didn’t know the feelings that he had.

Francis Pitt echoed deeply, ‘To our poor dear Hurrell.’ She dutifully participated in this queer male ceremony, and stared down on the tablecloth, trying to think of Hurrell, who oddly enough was now a vaguer personality in her mind than he had been this morning, although everybody had been talking about him for the last hour. She could not feel interested in him. As soon as was decent she lifted her eyes to Francis Pitt again, and was amazed to find that as he set down his glass his face wore the expression of one who embarks on a journey which he has often made before, which he has always liked, which he expects to find more delightful this time than ever. Immediately it faded, and his face became a mask of misery again. It was extraordinary that just for one second, in the midst of his grief, he should have felt such glee. It occurred to her that no doubt this was due to a result of early poverty that she had often noticed in herself. No doubt his parents, like hers, had been so poor that they could hardly ever ask people in for meals, and no doubt he, like she, felt therefore a perpetual delight in being able to have people in whenever he liked and have things nice for them. That was it, of course. But though Etta, poor Etta, was like that too in an ordinary way, she was evidently too tired to feel it tonight, for she was looking at Sunflower with an expression of pity. She must be thinking of what had happened with Essington the last time they met. Sunflower smiled at her to show that it was all right. Never in her life had she felt happier.

‘Well,’ said Francis Pitt, his face still puckered by laughter at Essington’s story about the Nationalist members and the Egyptian patriots. ‘If anybody had told me two hours ago that I should ever be as happy as I am now I should not have believed them.’

Leaning forward, he dipped his paw-hands into the trough of carnations and clumsily patted the flowers aside till he found a large white one. He shook the water from its stem with the prudent look of an animal and held it out to Sunflower. They all looked at her benevolently, pleased with her beauty. She remembered that it was just at this stage of the meal, when they were sitting over the coffee and brandy and cigars, that they had begun to make a fuss of her the other night. As a matter of fact that was nearly always the time when people took notice of her at a dinner.

‘She’d look nice with a pink one,’ suggested Etta.

‘Yes,’ purred Essington, quizzical and proud, ‘Sunflower can raise pink to her own dignity.’

Francis Pitt said levelly and casually but obstinately, ‘I’ve given her the flower I think she ought to have.’ As he spoke the door began to shake under bouts of delicate scratching, and he swung round in his chair shouting, ‘Hey, my beauties! Hey, my beauties! Frederick, let those dogs in!’

‘They’re his borzois,’ Etta explained to Essington and Sunflower; and added, as if complimenting them, ‘He hasn’t let them near him for the last three days.’

The door was thrown open and four great moonlight-coloured dogs came springing down the long dark room. Nooses of pale flowers cast by athletes might have parted the air swiftly like this, have landed on the ground as softly. They did not seem dogs of this world, for their barking sounded so hollow and echoing that they might have been coursing through the caverns of some magical landscape superimposed on the ordinary scene; and when they came near the brightness of the table their eyes changed from the points of blue radiance that had gleamed from their snake-flat heads in the dark to common affairs of lash and liquid iris, as if they had had to make some compromise of substance before they could enter the society of human beings. With the motion of wind-driven flames they leaped up and down round Francis Pitt, who cried out at them lovingly and cursingly, but did not look at them because he was pouring port into his empty champagne glass. ‘Ah, will you be quiet, you devils! Get down! Get down!’ One of them wrangled at his cuff with its teeth, and the brown stream of port swirled round the glass’s edge, made a blister of brightness on the mahogany table, and foundered on the peach-parings on his plate. ‘My God, my God, making a mess of your good home! Are you trying to make out to the visitors that you’ve never been taught manners?’ he grumbled, and slipped his elbow into the open jaws, jerked it up, and threw the long beast back on its haunches. It flung up its tape-thin muzzle, uttering coughs of lament, and he argued with it, cramming his hands down into the glass of port. ‘Try and have some sense, you fool dogs. How can I get drinks for you if you’re all over me like a pack of old women after a handsome curate? Give me time … Now then!’ He flung himself back in his chair, stretching out his wet hands level with his shoulders, and the tall dogs leapt up and licked his fingers. ‘Ah, my beauties, my beauties, my delights!’ He watched them with an expression of gratified cunning, as if he had won some advantage over them by pandering to their appetites, which was absurdly, lovably inappropriate to the innocent occasion. It was that he was the harmless kind of man who likes to be taken for worse than he is. ‘Ah, you know good port when you get it. When I die I’m going to leave these dogs all my port and they are going to drink every night to the glory of my soul.’ He snatched back his hands, wet them afresh while the dogs leapt and whimpered, and thrust out dripping fingers again. ‘Aren’t they wonderful? Aren’t they the finest dogs in the world? Two gentlemen and two ladies. Tamerlane and Jenghiz Khan the gentlemen’s names are, and the ladies are called Peggy Joyce and Jean Nash. No you’ll not get a drop more. You’ve had enough, you devils. I know that. I gave you more once upon a time and you blundered round my house in the most disgusting condition, each of you trying to rub off the second tail and the fifth leg you thought you’d got against my poor furniture. Oh, such ongoings, such ongoings.’ He gathered them all close to him, stacking their forepaws on his knees, rubbing his face against their frosted shoulders and the frail hoops of their ribs while they passed long pink flannel tongues over his hands and ears and neck and every bit of his bare flesh they could find, he and they all swaying to a rhythm of turbulent animal tenderness, keeping in time to it with grunting little noises.

It was a pity that Essington did not let himself go like this sometimes, doing things that certainly hadn’t any sense in them, but kept one human.

‘Yes, we’re fond of animals in this house,’ said Etta, though the dogs took no notice of her and she made no movement towards them.

‘Narrow, passionate faces,’ mused Essington. ‘A pity they can’t participate in human institutions. They would have a talent for patriotism …’

‘They are darlings,’ said Sunflower. ‘Do they have puppies?’

‘They do, they do, at God’s appointed times,’ Francis Pitt assured her, ‘and you shall have a puppy from the next litter. If you care about keeping dogs, that is.’

Sunflower and Essington met each other’s eyes and looked away.

Essington said acidly, ‘Yes, do give Sunflower a puppy. She likes dogs. She calls them doggies when she thinks I’m not listening.’

Nothing but laughter on his face, Francis Pitt was down bickering with his dogs again. ‘Jean, will you keep still while I turn your ears the right side out? Do you think the lady I named you for would come down to dinner at Deauville with both her ears outside in? Let me tell you that a good woman looks on her home as a perpetual Deauville. You keep that in mind or you’ll be losing your Jenghiz Khan and your Tamerlane to Peggy who’s the trimmer wench of you two, and keeps her ears as a girl should.’ Then, beating all four off, and holding his head back to dodge their muzzles, he called to Essington. ‘The reason I offered Miss Fassendyll a puppy is that she’s one of the very few women who continue to look beautiful when my dogs are in the room. Isn’t that true, Etta?’ His face was flushed with his scrimmage with the borzois and he spoke loudly to drown their barking; he was like a man reaching the top of a mountain and shouting with delight at the view. He did not pause to give Sunflower that hard gaze referring to the future with which most men follow up their compliments but passed straight into a fit of chuckling. ‘It’s a test I don’t pass myself. I’ve had that brought home to me. Etta, shall I show them that drawing of Goleath’s?’

‘Oh, that horrible thing …’

‘I think I’ll put myself in your hands, Essington, and let you see it. Etta, where is the thing? I thought it was hanging up somewhere in this room.’

‘No, indeed, it’s in the top drawer of the right-hand book-case. I took it down the other day when some people were coming to lunch. I couldn’t bear it any longer.’

‘God bless our loyal women,’ chuckled Francis Pitt, and heaved himself out of his chair. With the dogs ambling beside him he padded out of the bright zone round the table over to the mahogany dinosaurs of the furniture creations that towered in the shadow beyond, and stayed stooping in front of it for much longer than Essington, with his feline faculty for swift movement, would have needed to do. There was a curious quality about his movements whenever he did anything with his hands; it was not exactly clumsiness, rather was it as if he was not used to finding his paws split up into fingers and that the use of these finicking new instruments made it necessary for him to readjust the whole of his body which had been used to simpler motions. It somehow made one feel fierce with tenderness, like the stumbling of a child learning to walk. When he had found what he wanted he stayed for a moment with his back to them, looking down at it, then gave a guffaw. ‘My God! Am I as bad as that.’ He was laughing; but there was something in his tone which told that the little creature really minded being ugly quite a lot. But he was in high spirits again in a second, crossing the room with the picture held by a corner so that its frame nearly swung against the floor, and saying happily, greedily, as if he were tasting some gross, rich flavour of life, some trace of garlic in the universe: ‘Goleath is an ungrateful devil. God knows how much government money I got him for his war pictures, and how much of my own I’ve lent him, and how often I’ve saved him from jail and expulsion from France and suchlike calamities. Nevertheless he did this drawing to amuse my enemies more than me. Mercifully he showed it to me one day when he was drunk and I bought it off him then and there. Look at the damned thing!’ He put it down in front of Essington with a flourish. ‘Isn’t it awful?’