Sunflower (28 page)

It was queer that people liked her better in this than in anything else she had ever done, because she had never hated acting so violently before nor gone through a performance so blindly. She could not keep her mind on what she was saying, she walked about the stage in a fluid, desperate state, never holding a pose because she had no clear sense of what pose she was taking nor confidence that any of them were relevant, speaking and moving with a special intensity because of her need to work off the restlessness that nowadays was always tormenting her like prickly heat felt inside instead of outside the skin. But it was true that though you would have thought that going on like this you wouldn’t get anywhere, she found herself establishing a relationship with her audience which had more life in it than anything she’d ever got before. When she cried out those lines in the third act, her mind blank of all sense of what they meant and dizzy with the effort to keep from abandoning itself to thoughts of Francis Pitt, she felt an extraordinary effect of strong impact with the audience. It was as if she had become hysterical and done something violent and satisfying with her hand and then heard the smash of breaking china. What she was doing could not be quite right, for though this was just the same passionate effect that great actors got they knew what they were doing as they did it, and achieved a serenity contemporaneous and co-equal with their passion. But at any rate she had broken out of her old stupidity. She was not being bad any more in the way that Essington had always laughed at. She was not imagining this, other people felt it just as well. The papers said quite a lot about reversing their opinion. There had been several marvellous notices, some of them so good in this new allusive way that you had to go and look things up in the encyclopaedia. One young man who, she learned on enquiry, had been considered very clever at Oxford, wrote in one of the evening papers: ‘In her difficult moments we hail the great, glowing, grape-golden compeer of El Greco and Scriabin, with this and that of the simple magic of Michelangelo and Bach, when she has but to sweep loveliness from the ambient air with common motions of her fingertips and the flatter remarks of the not ever nearly worthy (as who could be, save maybe Euripides and WWerfel) dramatist.’ Essington himself had said after the first night, petulantly and yet with a kind of awe in his voice, ‘You’ve changed, Sunflower. I don’t know that you’ll do any good by confusing your public …’ And Francis Pitt had seen it too. He had not been at the first night, for she had begged him to stay away in case she made a silly of herself, but he had sat in a box all by himself on the second night and came round afterwards to take her out to supper at the Embassy. He had stood in her dressing-room, rather silent and awkward, which she quite understood for it was the first time they had met since that queer time when she had cut out his shirt-front. She had been immensely amused to see how his queer shy eyes which appraised everything within sight, not avariciously but in the spirit of a child waiting with its mother in a greengrocer’s shop who pinches the fruit just to see what it feels like, lingered on the tubes of greasepaint in front of her mirror, the stage costumes hanging on the pegs, the gold silk wrapper lying in a semi-circle on the floor where she had stepped out of it, the flowers, the telegrams pinned on the wall, the dresser in her tight black gown eyeing the visitor with a flattering air of discretion. She fancied she saw him holding himself with a self-conscious swagger, pouting out his lips into a bad man’s expression. Naively, childishly, it seemed to her, he was saying, ‘I am in an actress’s dressing-room.’ Then she remembered the stories about him and Dolores Methuen and the Nelly Sisters and she perceived that what was thrilling him about the scene was not its novelty but its familiarity, its association with past private delights. For a minute she looked away from him and continued to powder her neck and arms, trying to bring back to mind various sermons against jealousy that Essington had read her from time to time, particularly in the middle period of their life together, when she had cared more for him than he did for her. But it wasn’t any good, she couldn’t bear it, she found herself doing what one so queerly does towards men, and appealed to him for help against the hurt he himself was inflicting on her. She twisted round in her chair and cried out to him vehemently, through something ordinary he was saying about the play, ‘But what did you really think of me? What did you
really
think of me?’ He seemed embarrassed by her importunity. He thrust out his chin, lowered his eyelids, and said stiffly, like a man who has been begged by a woman to speak of intimate matters that he himself would have been too delicate to raise, ‘You’re acting quite differently from the way you’ve acted in any other play I’ve seen you in. You’ve … altered completely.’ Oh, he hadn’t liked her! There was something disagreeable, something resistant, almost a sneer in his tone. She dropped her powder-puff and clasped her hands and cried out, ‘Then you didn’t like it!’ His face changed. For a minute he looked at her with an expression that was startled and honest and kindly. Then his eyes flickered, and the blood rose under his skin, and he said in that thick voice he often used to her, which sounded as if he were tasting good wine, eating delicious food, ‘I never liked anything better in my life.’ She had a curious feeling that in saying that he had abandoned himself to a temptation which he had meant to resist.

It was after that he suggested they should go to the Embassy and telephoned for a table. She was glad, for they had a lovely time. She had never liked the Embassy before at night, but he saw to it that she enjoyed it. He did look after one well. When he told her in the car that Maurice and Leonora Hughes were dancing there just now, and she said she’d never seen them before as Essington didn’t care for that sort of thing, he was so pleased that he was going to show her something lovely for the first time, and he took ever such pains to make sure that she should see them properly. He wouldn’t take the table that had been reserved for them because she wouldn’t have had a good view, and they had to wait in the doorway till another was put in for them right in the corner of the dancing floor, which was embarrassing, for it meant that they had to stand under the white spotlight which was trained there ready for the dancers’ entrance. He felt shy too. She could feel him shaken by silent nervous laughter. Then when they sat down he was quite fussy about ordering something that she’d fancy, not a bit like Essington, who never picked up a menu without reminding her that she oughtn’t to eat anything or she’d get fat. He let her have sweet wine, too. And Leonora Hughes was the loveliest thing she’d ever seen. She was like the smell of one’s hands after one has been picking lemon verbena, and she looked so really nice, as if her life was like her feathery, floating dress, as if when she was disappointed about anything she wouldn’t work it off by being nasty to anybody else, but would just go away and cry and then suddenly stop crying and be very happy because of nothing in particular, as if her emotions were shapely and slim like her legs. During her funny dance, when she and Maurice pretended to be a stenographer and a travelling salesman at a New York palais de danse, and everybody was shrieking with laughter, it broke on Sunflower that at last she was having as good a time as the people at the next table. She was enjoying herself in the way she ought to have enjoyed herself during her twenties and hadn’t. Because of Francis Pitt she was not, after all, going to miss anything, though she was thirty. Enjoying her own laughter as much as any part of the treat, she turned her laughing face towards him, so that he might see what he had done for her; and was appalled by his appearance. He was sitting hunched up in his chair, his great head pressing down his short neck to nothingness between his shoulders, looking troglodytish, queer in shape and queer in substance, for his blank and joyless face had turned the grey-brown colour that a chip in coarse china shows. His narrowed eyes stared across the lit space where Leonora twirled like the crescent moon trying to be buffoonish, over the smiling faces of the people who sat up to their necks in indistinctness at the tables, to the middle of the purple and green wall, which was now supported at regular intervals as by caryatids by the men and women who were standing up on the plush benches so that they could see better, almost dissolved by darkness to mere stripes of decoration, alternately magpie and gaily coloured, save when laughter made them sway forward and bring their shadow-patterned faces near the light. There the door was an oblong of darkness. He wanted to be outside it. She saw his spirit wandering down some unlit street that led to no home. She gave a little moan of distress and sympathy and put out her hand as if to stroke her wrist. He turned and looked very gravely at her, seemed to make some resolution, and made a slow reluctant gesture towards the orchestra, as if when the music stopped he would tell her something important and not pleasant. Again she had that sense of being strong enough for both. It did not matter what he had to tell her, she could bear up under it, she could make something of it.

But when the music stopped he told her nothing. It happened that one of the men who were sitting at the table behind them stood up and in the wildness of his applause pressed quite close against Sunflower, so that his coat touched her bare shoulders. Both she and Francis Pitt looked up at him sharply, and they saw it was the Duke of Victoria, a big fair man, whose downy face now as always bore an aggrieved expression, as if he were slightly hurt that he had not been born a bull. Francis put his arm round her with a protective movement so intimate that it surprised her, so vehement that it jogged the Duke’s attention away from Leonora. He stared hard at Sunflower whom he had been trying to get to know for years, quite unsuccessfully, for he wasn’t the sort of person it did one any good to be seen with, since he’d kept everybody that you can keep and married several of the rest. Then he looked at Francis and said in an astonished, congratulatory tone, ‘Oh, it’s you, Pitt!’ It was funny what a child Francis was in some ways. He couldn’t have given himself away more if he had tried than he did by his sleepy, happy, preoccupied smile, his vague, friendly, remote, definitely dismissive greeting, which begged that he might be left in peace with his delight. But of course it didn’t matter. She turned to him as soon as all the clapping was over, and asked, ‘What is it?’ He faced her with an expression that was so satisfied with the moment that in anybody else it would have been gross. ‘What is what?’ She stammered, ‘When you looked at the door I thought …’ He said patiently, as if she had been tactless to remind him of his lapse into depression but would be forgiven because he liked her so much, ‘I was thinking of Hurrell. Let’s dance now. It’s “Horsey, keep your tail up”.’ For a little she was uncomfortable because she had been so stupid, but then she looked furtively at his face to see if she had really upset him, and found it heavy with a secret joy, the eyes veiled, the lips slightly parted, and again suspected that he loved her. Certainly he must love her. Why, when they got up to go during a lull in the music and went across the dancing-floor towards the door he walked beside her with so contented an air of possessiveness that they might already have been lovers.

That was the last time she had ever seen him at night. He had asked her to go out to supper again, but Essington had made a fuss and said she would lose her looks if she kept late hours. She had hopes that perhaps they might dine together on Sundays, but Essington had just about then developed a queer passion for going away with her every weekend. It was true that she still saw him in the daytime but that did not make up for the lack of seeing him at night. There was a funny way his shirt-front bulged, like the cheeks of a cherub, that she wanted to see as if she were starving and the sight of it food she could eat. But of course she ought to be thankful because now she lunched with him nearly every day except when she had a matinée. And that was lovely, for one met so many interesting people. Always, always, there was somebody else there. To begin with, there was Etta, who was a dear but got on her nerves because she would look at her as if she were sorry for her. Once Sunflower and Francis had been in the library together, bending over the central table and turning over the pages of a huge old Bible, the illustrations of which amused him for some reason that she couldn’t understand though of course she laughed, when she got a feeling that she was being watched. She raised her head sharply and looked out of one of the windows and saw Etta standing on the terrace outside in a petrified attitude. Her eyes were fixed on Sunflower and her brother, her right hand held a pair of scissors open above a rose on one of the standards, her left hand was crushing a sheaf of bright flowers against her flat and heavy bosom so tightly that it was apparent that she was so absorbed in what she was seeing that she did not know what she was doing; and her swarthy face was darkened a second time by a cloud of heavy, foreboding compassion. Sunflower flashed a smile at her to show her that it was all right, and Etta gave such a start at having been seen, and so forced an answering smile that it was apparent she obstinately believed it to be all wrong. After lunch, when Francis went up to see Hurrell, she had done her best to make it plain to Etta (as she had already tried to do more than once but the woman didn’t seem capable of taking it in) that Essington had been ever so much better lately and that anyway she was gorgeously, marvellously, indestructibly happy just now. This Etta had handsomely but uneasily pretended to accept, saying, ‘Yes, they do have their ups and downs, don’t they? And the ups are just as up as the downs are down,’ but she had worn such an expression of infinite pity that Sunflower could have smacked her face.

But after all Etta did not matter, for she had a right to be there. If Francis Pitt had not wanted her there, he still could hardly have helped having her there. It was her home. But all those other people had no right in the house, they could be there only because Francis Pitt wanted them to be there. Now as the car swung down the chestnut avenue she stared ahead of her at the open gates that were hinged on a blank of green brightness at the end of the shadows and bared her teeth at the thought of the enemies that were behind them. There were so many of them. While Harrowby drove the car up the drive, which he was doing with such ill temper that several times they lurched on to the grass kerb, she looked from right to left as she might have for an ambush. Of course she could see well enough why he liked some of them to be there. It was indeed a proof of his unique virtue, of the shaggy beauty of his character, that he should have them there. He had Bryce Atkin and Mr Macbride the banker there rather more than their connection with his political party made necessary, but that was because of his great sense of humour. It was so funny to see the pair of them facing the politician’s problem in such different ways: Mr Bryce Atkin conscious, with a roll and momentary dulling of his bright little robin’s eye, that he was going to too many places for his soul’s sake, and then brisking up and shaking out his feathers and deciding to work off any moral blame that might have attached itself to him by giving as good a show as he knew how at every place he went to so that nobody could say he was accepting hospitality for nothing; Mr Macbride conscious, with an increasing concavity of his Scotch jaws, of the same disquieting fact and, after assuming a silent lankness just too clenched to be called limpness, making a sustained effort to repudiate the whole situation by giving no sort of show at all. Their presence there was really quite lovely, because it was proof not only of Francis Pitt’s sense of humour but also of his beautiful modesty. He invited them just as he invited the colonial administrators and foreign potentates who sometimes gave his dining-room a Pathé Gazette look, because it was a constant amazement to him that such important people should bother to visit the ugly, undersized son of a Wesleyan minister. He thought nothing of himself, the poor little thing. It was that which accounted too for his passion for having nice-looking, wild people about him. He used to hang round his own tennis-court when Teddy Drayton and Lord Orisser were playing a singles as if he thought that it was good of them to let him look on, and watch them with the most pathetically worshipping, unjealous envy. It was the same desire to know at secondhand what it was to be physically active as he was not that made him fill the place with young people like Peggy Bryce Atkin, and the three Cornelliss children, Lionel, Michael, and Susan, who looked so nice playing tennis in their white things with their long legs and their lovely straight backs and their sleek brushed heads, and who sounded such ducks when they called to each other in the high voice that girls and boys who have been well brought up have, a thin, pure voice which wouldn’t be any use on the stage and is lovely in private life. It was nice of Francis Pitt to have them about; it wasn’t every man who liked children. And it was nice of him to have their father, Sir Robert Cornelliss, because it must be just out of gratitude for the way he was looking after Mr Hurrell, for he was the most awful old bore. He was one of those people who embarrass you terribly because they sit around not saying very much but making you feel that they are telling themselves some silly kind of a story about you. He would come and stand behind her while she was watching the tennis, very tall and greyhoundish, resting his fine, long hands on the back of the bench miles away from her shoulders, so that it couldn’t be that which made her feel so uncomfortable; turning his distinguished, high-bridged profile swiftly and suavely from player to player; occasionally making a remark about the score in his pleasant voice and keeping an easy, unfidgetting silence in between the games. He did not do or say a thing that was objectionable, yet when he said a courteous farewell and strolled away she had a horrid sense that he had pinched something from her, that he had put her at a disadvantage. But there wasn’t any denying that he did everything he could think of for Mr Hurrell, and didn’t mind coming over any time he was sent for, day or night. Of course Francis Pitt had to give him the run of the house.