Sunflower (24 page)

‘Awful of you? No, by God, it was not. It was awful of them. The fools, the silly little fools. Such a little thing to snigger about.’

‘Oh, but it was a dreadfully stupid mistake.’

‘But such a tiny mistake. It just shows what small minds people have. It’s a mistake anybody might have made. My God, the words in the dictionary I can’t pronounce …’

‘Really?’ she asked, very pleased. ‘Do you have trouble that way? Oh, but you aren’t stupid. You see, it isn’t just that I’m ignorant, I do such silly things. I suppose you heard about the interview I gave the
Evening Mail
when I first signed up to play in “As You Like It”?’

‘Not a word,’ he told her stoutly.

‘That was awful. I told the young man I was looking forward to it because it was the first time I’d acted in a Barrie play. Wasn’t it dreadful of me? And he went and put it in the papers, though he had stayed on and had his tea. I never heard the last of it. But really it wasn’t such an out of the way mistake to make, because Barrie did write a play called “Rosalind”. All the same, people laughed.’

‘The fools, the damned fools,’ he said with mounting indignation. ‘As if all that stuff mattered. But I hate to think of you exposed to all this spite and jealousy and meanness. I wish to God you weren’t on the stage.’

She began to move on along the avenue. ‘I don’t like it much,’ she murmured.

‘A woman like you,’ he said gravely, ‘ought to be at home, ought to be …’

He did not finish his sentence. They walked in silence, ploughing up the flowers, looking down at them. She felt ever so much better. How this little man understood things. He saw how horrid it was for her to be laughed at; he would realise how she felt when people talked about her and Essington. She felt a sense of gratitude and affection not only for him but for this place where so many lovely things were happening: where a great man was waiting sweetly for death, and this little man was loving him so warmly, and Etta was serving them both with such devotion, and where, when she had come in for an hour or two, they had cured her of a worry that would have choked her for days, just by being simple and kind. She stopped and leaned against a tree-trunk, and looked at the pale hills and the roof that was shining like water, so that she would never forget them, and this night.

‘It’s nice here,’ she said huskily.

He stood beside her, his feet wide apart and his shoulders hunched, a kind little Napoleon. ‘Yes, it’s nice.’

They stood in silence for a little while. Her eyes brimmed with tears, but not because she felt unhappy. It was part of the relaxation brought about by the place. Of late she had always had a few tears just under the surface and now that she was all loosened these flowed, but none took their place behind her eyes. She was utterly happy, utterly at peace.

Suddenly she felt very shy, and wondered if he were not thinking her odd, and boring, and silly. She began to move away.

‘Wait a moment,’ he said very softly. ‘That’s a London tree-trunk you’ve been leaning against. Most likely it’s left a mark on your frock. Turn round and let me see.’ She watched him over her shoulder while he peered at the silk. He was very careful not to touch her. There was a beautiful decorum, a respect for physical reserves, about all his movements, though they were so friendly and cherishing. ‘No, not a thing. I am glad. It’s a very lovely frock.’ He was speaking very, very softly and she answered him as they moved on in a whisper. A cloud was passing before the moon, and it seemed right that all other things should be muted like the light.

But suddenly she uttered a loud cry.

‘My flower! I’ve lost my flower!’

‘What flower?’

‘The flower you gave me at dinner! I’ve let it fall.’

‘But there are lots more in the house. I’ll give you another—’

‘That wouldn’t be the same! I want this one! Oh, I had it this very minute!’

She hurried back to the place where they had been standing and knelt down on the ground and scrabbled among the fallen flowers, the other flowers that were not valuable. He stooped over her but did not help her in her search. Almost at once she looked up into his face and called out happily, ‘Look, I’ve found it! I knew I had it when we were here!’ She rose to her feet and he straightened himself to his little lesser height. She stood smiling at him and twirling the flower in her fingers, wondering why he did not say he was glad that she had found it. It was lovely that he was so small, it gave him the charm of a child as well as a man. Yet in a queer way it had been nice when she had been kneeling and he had been standing. She would have liked not to have got up but to kneel in front of him and take his hands and kiss them. Then perhaps he might have bent down and kissed her on the lips. It came to her like a thunderclap that there was nothing that a man can do to a woman in the way of love which she did not wish him to do to her. She was in love with Francis Pitt. Pleasure swept over her, pricking the palms of her hands; and she seemed to have been promised the kind of peace she had always longed for, an end to the fretfulness of using the will, passivity. She felt as if she had become as stable, as immovable as one of the chestnut trees. But this passivity would be more passionate than any activity, for like a tree she had a root, force was driving down through her body into the earth. It would work there in the darkness, it would tear violently up through the soil again and victoriously come into the light. She thought of that moment at her mother’s funeral when the four dark figures stood beside the hole in the ground where there lay a black box holding the body which had caused them all. The ground, the ground, she had at last become part of the process that gets life out of the ground. She felt so grateful to him for somehow doing this for her that she could have licked his hands as the dogs had done.

It seemed to her inevitable that he should say something in his deep voice that would tell her what to do, that would bring her the beginning of her passivity. But he said nothing, standing turned sideways to her, his head down, his hand covering his mouth, till he was caught away from her by another of those rushes of good spirits. All of a sudden he was striding along in front of her with his hands in his pockets and a lift in his tread, crying out in a ringing, hearty tone, not so deep as his ordinary voice but more ordinary and jolly, ‘Well, we must go back to the house now! That nurse woman will have turned Essington out long ago! Poor Essington! Poor Essington!’ He flung his head back and laughed loudly. Sunflower wondered what sort of a woman the nurse might be that he found the thought of an encounter between her and Essington so exquisitely amusing.

Following him was a pleasure, but she looked over her shoulder regretfully. ‘What’s that … that white thing we were walking towards?’

‘A statue of love!’ he called gaily and perfunctorily. ‘I’ll take you there some other time! You’ll be coming here often, you know!’ He was hurrying, he might have been an excited boy who had found something wonderful in the garden and wanted to show it to the people at home. When they came to the steps down through the shrubbery and she had to go slowly, because she did not know the way, he showed what would have been impatience had it not been so utterly unclouded by anything like ill temper.

‘You do seem happy all of a sudden,’ she said as they crossed the gravel square. She had to say something. She felt as if a great bird were beating its wings within her breast.

‘I am happy. I am happy!’ he answered gravely. ‘How should I not be happy, when you have lifted a load off my mind? You have done that for me by what you said about Hurrell.’ Whistling softly, he ran up the steps to the front door. He liked her, at least he liked her.

On the threshold he came to a halt and laughed aloud.

Over his shoulder she saw Essington sitting in the hall alone, stretched out very low in an armchair, his face nearly hidden.

Francis Pitt strolled across the room, rubbing his hands, and stood looking down on him with an indulgent air. ‘So you’ve been turned out by that nurse woman.’

‘Yes. Yes. With a great show of efficiency and womanly spirit. Odd that the profession of attending the sick is so often taken up by the female equivalent of the more powerful and relentless type of prizefighter …’ He did not show them his face, but he sounded very tired and querulous. ‘Sunflower we must go home. I’m tired. And I have to do something tomorrow. I don’t remember what it is. Don’t you remember, Sunflower? I’m sure I told you.’

‘Well, you can go home,’ Francis Pitt told him good-humouredly. ‘Your car’s outside and your chauffeur’s standing by it, admiring the stars.’

‘Was he out there?’ asked Sunflower. She had noticed nothing.

‘We nearly fell over him,’ said Francis Pitt. ‘Have a drink before you go, Essington? Whisky? Or some brandy? The brandy’s the best thing I’ve got.’

‘No. No. Yes. I’d like some brandy. I feel cold.’

Francis Pitt went over to a tray on the table and poured out some brandy with steady easy movements. He was amazingly better than he had been when they had arrived; better even than he had been that first night at dinner at her house. He offered the glass to Sunflower.

‘No, I don’t touch it, ever,’ she said. Because he gave her a straight, deep look, she became uncertain that she was so very beautiful after all.

‘Yes, our Sunflower is very respectable. Sunflower has all the puritan prejudices of the lower middle classes,’ grumbled Essington, putting out his hand for the glass. She thought he needn’t have said it like that, particularly when they had had that talk about Billie Murphy before dinner. But when he was tired things seemed to slip his mind. ‘And when one gets the dear thing to drink she likes her wine sweet.’

‘God bless her, that’s one of the ways one knows a good woman,’ said Francis Pitt, pouring out soda-water for her and some brandy for himself. She settled down in an armchair, facing Essington across the hearth. Francis Pitt went and sat on the high padded kerb of the fender, his little legs drawn up under him, his feet hooked across the metal bars. Over the rim of his glass his narrowed gaze swung like a pendulum between the two. When he had finished drinking the corners of his mouth were turned up as if he had liked his brandy very much.

She wished that a magician would change her into a cat, so that she could come and live in this house without the question of love being raised; for of course nothing like that could ever happen, not the way they met. Though there wasn’t any use worrying over that, for if they hadn’t met this way they wouldn’t have met at all. If she were a cat he would lift her off chairs, saying funny, rough, loving things to her as he did to the borzois, and would give her bits of food in his fingers. Thinking of magic made her remember the name of a clairvoyant in South Molton Street that one of the girls at the theatre had been talking about. She would like to see if she was any good. But that would be sly, for she would not be able to tell Essington. There wasn’t anything he hated quite as much as clairvoyants and spiritualist mediums.

Abruptly Essington asked, ‘When will he die?’

He was miserable, miserable. She must pull herself together and take notice of him.

‘Six weeks,’ answered Francis Pitt.

Oh, God, he was so miserable, she had done nothing for him, she could not do anything for him, she could not even touch him.

‘Very good brandy,’ said Essington cantankerously.

‘Some more.’

‘No. No. I haven’t the capacity of your friend Canterton.’

‘Canterton is not my friend,’ said Francis Pitt. He spoke with a touch of stiffness. ‘He was brought along tonight by Jack Murphy, to whom I am bound by various ties of my misspent youth. But he’s no friend of mine, and I am sorry that you saw him here in that condition.’

‘Oh, don’t apologise for his condition. Indeed, I don’t think, and I’ve watched our friend Canterton ever since he came to the House, that I’ve ever seen him to such advantage before. I’ve seen him unable to walk, prostrate on the woolsack; I’ve seen him leaning on a table to support himself through one of those speeches that consist of sham eighteenth-century epigrams delivered in a bar-parlour voice. But I have never seen him absolutely speechless before. No, I don’t think I’ve ever before seen him to such an advantage.’

Francis Pitt was lifting his glass to his lips, but he lowered it. ‘My God, Essington,’ he said, ‘I would not like to have you for an enemy.’ He looked at the other man steadily for a minute, and then repeated, ‘No, I would not like to have you as my enemy.’ He lifted his glass and emptied it, then turned round and set it on the mantelpiece and stood looking down, as if he were considering something from a fresh point of view. She wondered what was troubling him now. It could plainly have nothing to do with the words he had repeated. As tired people do, he was simply taking a chance phrase he happened to find in his mouth and saying it over and over again, making it relevant by fitting it to the rhythm of his distress.

‘Sunflower,’ said Essington wearily, pulling himself out of the chair, ‘I want to go home.’

Francis Pitt wheeled round, walked slowly across the room, pressed the bell, and stood dusting his fingertips against each other, as if he had finished a delicate job.

‘Sunflower, little Sunflower, why are you crying?’

She would not say, she pressed her face against his shoulder so that it should not be found by the lances of light the street-lamps drove through the car window. .

‘Oh, little Sunflower, is it because you think I’m old like Hurrell and may die too? Oh, you silly little Sunflower, come close and be comforted!’

For a moment she stared into the darkness of his coat. But there was no way of being honest. She went on crying.

IV

IT was plain that he did not love her, for he never wanted to see her alone. She walked for a time in the desert of that thought; and then perceived that Harrowby was still standing at the door of the car, waiting for orders.

She began, ‘Up to—’ and then checked herself. ‘Harrowby, you don’t look well.’

‘I’m quite all right, Madam.’

‘But you can’t be all right. Not when you’re looking like this. I’ve noticed for some time back you haven’t been too bright. But I haven’t seen you look like this, ever—’