Sunflower (42 page)

On a square pedestal, shoulder-high, stood a boy with wings. He was a child, so that his limbs were round; but he was grown enough to have a hollow back and proudly carried loins. A cloud dressed him in their darkness.

She murmured, ‘Oh … I thought there was a fountain here.’

He answered, ‘No. Only this statue. Of love.’

He had loosened his hold of her. She was not sure if she could stand alone. Swaying, she looked up at the boy and her head fell back on her throat. She stretched up her arms and moulded in the air the childish roundness of his limbs, whispering, ‘I would like to be a sculptor … I would like to make figures out of wet clay …’

Francis Pitt struck down her hands, not cruelly, not kindly. Simply he wanted them for himself, to fold in his, to put to his great mouth. Then, as if he were making an immense trial of strength, he stepped backwards and stood apart from her, and shook himself, and made a soft, roaring noise of triumph, because though they were separate they were still as linked as if the same blood were flowing by some canal through both their hearts. And solemnly he said, ‘Sunflower, I love you very, very much.’

Remembering this, she felt again that silver hammer strike her nerves and shatter them into a thousand splinters of ecstasy. She drowned in a deep sea, and in the depths was given back her life, and slowly floated up, and up, and up, into the light, into the sunshine of the garden, into the sunshine where the hedgehog was wriggling its nose on the bottom of the saucer and making it jump on its base, and the three women in the print dresses smiled at her with their nice country faces, and poor Harrowby leaned against the wall, turning his head towards his own shadow, as if he found the noon brightness a little trying. She had never really been away from these things, she had been looking down at the saucer, at the diminishing circle of milk and thinking, ‘Now that’s too yellow for nature, yellow down to the last drop, country milk’s whiter, but there, what are you to do, all London milk is dyed with that annatto stuff, and it’s no use changing the dairy, for they all belong to the same combine and one’s the same as another.’ Yet at the same time she had been with Francis out in the night that was like a stirring snake, she had felt him give her his soul and herself take it, she had heard him say, ‘Sunflower, I love you very, very much.’ She supposed that it would always be so now. That beside the plain buff surface of life there would be the golden stripe of what happened to her with him, and she could always put out her hand from any dreary place where she might be and touch it with her memory and relive its loveliness. It was a pity she did not go to church now, for she could think of him during the sermon. There was nothing he was not doing for her, he was putting her on a ledge in the universe where she would never be fatigued or bored, he was making her, he was saving her.

She wondered if the others had noticed how far away she had gone that minute. She glanced shyly from face to face. Harrowby had seen nothing. He looked as if he were blind with a sick headache. But the three women were smiling at her with a hushed, steady kindliness. She was afraid they noticed she was very happy. It was nice of them to be glad. They must like her! But it made her feel confused, that they should have seen signs of this most private thing. She smiled back at them partly out of gratitude, partly to hide her embarrassment, and tried to think of some remark that would shift their attention from herself. She looked behind her at the garden and thought that the streaked dark red snapdragons were just the same colour as the juice on one’s plate when one had eaten damson tart and cream, and was not sure she really liked lavender, you felt it was aware that it was plain but very fragrant, and had the same acid sense of superiority over mere flowers that character actresses of ability have over all actresses, able or not, who play straight parts. That was no use, she turned round and looked up at the house: her house, that was at last free of Essington, in which she no longer needed to sit despondently like the stupid pupil of an irascible tutor, in which she could now lead her own life and do all the silly, funny things she wanted.

She called out, ‘I think I shall buy a dog!’

All three exclaimed, ‘Ooh yes!’ and Cook said handsomely, as if giving her full permission, ‘Yes, we’d like a bow-wow in the house again.’

‘You mustn’t steal him though!’ she warned them. ‘I don’t ever see Pussy, he’s always in the kitchen with you!’

At that moment, as if he had heard himself being spoken of, and wanted to see that no liberties were taken, Sambo thrust his three-cornered black velvet nose between the two print elbows on the window-ledge, closed his eyes as if to announce that he saw nothing worth seeing, let the exquisite moulding of his muzzle be delicately severed in two by a yawn, waved a pink strip of tongue, closed up all with a snap, and then did a brief, derisive, twitching dance with his ears, as if to make it quite plain that that had indeed been all he thought of the matter.

‘Oh, you know, he’s rude!’ exclaimed Sunflower.

‘Bless his Almightiness,’ said Cook, giving him a pat which he accepted with the tolerance of a young man who has married for money, and found that there is quite a lot of money. ‘He knows who his friends are.’

Parkyns said, in rather a low tone, so as to make the other two feel out of it, ‘What breed were you thinking of having, Madam?’

‘Oh, let’s have another peke!’ said Martyn.

Sunflower shook her head. She had cried so when she had had to give up Li Hung Chang. ‘A terrier would be nice … a Sealyham …’

She stopped. She had remembered that Francis Pitt had promised her one of the borzoi pups.

The night before drew her back to itself. There they had stood, and he had said those words about loving her. The cloud had travelled past the moon and as it passed unwound the veil of darkness from the statue, as if it were a scarf that had trailed from its hand. A rack of it remained for a little about the child’s right shoulder, and right arm, then he gleamed wholly white and dominant, the governor of this clearing. Putting her palms together under her chin, she answered, ‘Francis, I love you very, very much.’

He had held up his hand with one of his queer, pompous, great actor gestures. Heavily and conscientiously, like a rich merchant sitting in his office behind a vast mahogany desk and explaining the terms of a contract to one about to sign it whom he wished not to deceive, both because of his sense of honour and a matter of liking, he said: ‘Sunflower, I do not mean I love you as a friend. I do love my friends, I am loyal to my friends. But you, Sunflower, I love as a man loves a woman.’

His voice sounded false, it was so deep and laboured. She smiled to herself in the dark at this seeming falseness, it was so strangely at variance with his impassioned honesty, and it sprang from so dear a cause. For he was forcing his voice down as low as it could go, down far below where he could manage it, so that he should sound male.

Lifting her chin, she answered, ‘I love you as a woman loves a man.’

He made a growling sound of delight, his hands fluttered in front of him, but still he held himself back. Bringing his chin down on his poutering shirt-front and bending forward his broad shoulders till they were curved like a prie-dieu, he went on in this heavy, scrupulous, explanatory way. ‘You understand, Sunflower, I want you to give me your whole life? Would you do that for me?’

She asked, amazed, ‘Why, what else would I want to do with it?’ Again he made that growling sound. He jerked his head about, as if there were a bit in his mouth and he thought he could break it, and muttered drunkenly, ‘Sunflower, Sunflower …’ A questing, formless bulk, he thrust himself against her without moving his arms from his side. Softly, like somebody encouraging a child to walk, she said, ‘Kiss me, kiss me.’ Slowly his short, strong arms struggled free of his side, as if there were bands to be broken. When they gripped her he swayed clumsily, as if he were indeed a lion walking on its hind legs. She whispered, ‘Kiss me, oh, kiss me!’ His great head dropped forward into the hollow between her shoulder and her neck. He sighed deeply, and rolled it from side to side. Then he lifted it, and his mouth came down on hers like a blow.

Again the silver hammer struck her nerves, again she drowned in a deep sea, again she slowly rose into the sunshine of her garden. She was saying, ‘I’ve always thought I’d like an Aberdeen. I do think it’s funny the way they look so like Scotch people …’ That sounded all right. It was the kind of thing they printed in interviews with her, and there wasn’t any trouble unless Essington happened to see them. Shyly she glanced from face to face to see if any of them had noticed how far she had been away, but as before Harrowby was resting cheek by cheek with his own shadow on the wall, and the three women in the printed dresses were still smiling into the sunshine with a benignity that was as likely as not caused by the sunshine and nothing else. For it was a lovely day. Surely it was a specially lovely day. The few clouds were so thin they were no more than whorls in a glass bowl where the blower’s breath faltered, the unveiled sun softened the day with an apricot down and made all things wish not to move quickly, not to move at all, so that it was like the round cheek of a sunburned, sleeping child. Also everything seemed to be falling into a rhythm, into a pattern. In an infatuated search for the last drop the hedgehog was beating its little nose on the bottom of the saucer so that it spun on the stone like a top, and the two plump women leaning on the window-sill, the thin one standing alone, kept time in their lazy laughter. Looking about her, she saw for the first time that the three trees at the end of the garden grew like trees in a holy picture, as if their trunks had heard of the trinity and brought forth three branches apiece to its glory, as if the little twigs knew of other doctrines and busily sprouted this way and that to tell of them, like lesser brothers in a monastery bustling here and there on minor duties. She would not have been surprised if the dark houses behind them had been changed to the blue mountains that are seen in the country dreamed about by piety, blue as distance might be if it were ascetic, exalted but without the virility of rock, and if their leaves had become a golden treasury. She would not have been surprised if the falling acacia flowers had been supported before they reached the ground by a wind of intention and carried to her breast, where they would form a sign; or if the city thrushes, which were making short, circumscribed flights above her that were more like human aviation than the long surrenders to the air and victories over it which birds make in country skies, had suddenly flown down, slowly and straightly, and come to rest on her shoulders and her head. She stopped talking, she did not feel the need of keeping appearances going, she felt that if she trusted herself to this sunlit hour she would be all right.

It was lovely, just standing there in the brightness. It would not be so bad to be an image of a saint that stood for ever out of doors, in a shrine at the turn of the road above a valley, watching the sun burn the green corn to brown usefulness, watching the spears of rain strike down into the earth, which they do not kill but make more living since they change dust to wet mould, until that day when lightning flashes, and mountains are cleaved to their stony roots, and all images become flesh. During one’s waiting one would give hospitality to little creatures. Within the hollows of one’s gilt diadem a bird might build its nest, and soon short flights of nestlings would proceed from one’s head like rays; and she had heard of a wayside Madonna, creviced by weather within whom wild bees had made their honey. That pleased her. She became quite still, enacting to herself how it would be to stand in rain and shine with full wooden skirts about one, while in a hollow of one’s body dark buzzing principles of life built up cell upon cell of golden, feeding sweetness; and on her face she felt the sweet smile all images of holy women wear.

But Harrowby was saying something. She looked at him and was appalled. He had stepped clear of the wall and had one arm flung out. For a second she thought he was going to give her notice in some very insulting way, like the chauffeur before him, who had seemed so nice and jolly and devoted, but who had got terribly gloomy and taken to getting drunk, and when she went to discharge him had shouted at her that he would be glad to leave her and go into the service of respectable married people, and had flung his month’s money on the floor.

Whatever had given her that idea? His arm was flung out simply because he was pointing to the library window and all he was saying, and that quite without rudeness, indeed with the flattest lack of any emotion, was, ‘The telephone is ringing, Madam.’

It was Francis Pitt. She knew that at once.

She cried, ‘Oh!’ and looked up at the house as if she expected to see him tapping on the glass and beckoning her. Then she began to run towards the iron steps, but stopped herself at once. This time, surely, she had given herself away! When she glanced round at the three women in print dresses they were all paying attention to other things in the way that was a little too good to be true, like the way people unanimously pretend not to have heard when you have said something stupid so that you know they all have. Cook and Martyn had developed a sudden interest in the cat, which was twitching its ears in annoyance at being abruptly patted from both sides at once; and Parkyns was trying to suggest by angular movements that she well knew her duty was to answer the telephone but that her mistress seemed to want to answer it herself, and anyway she was absorbed in the hedgehog.

She said, ‘Parkyns, please …’

But it occurred to her that it would be dreadful when Parkyns came to the window and said, ‘Mr Pitt to speak to you, Madam.’ Then she would look so that they would all be certain. She said, ‘No … No … I’ll go … It may be … those photographs …’ and ran up the stairs.

At the top she halted. She wanted everyone, everything to be happy. ‘Look after the hedgehog! Put a box over it or something. We’d better take care of it for a few days. It did seem so hungry …’ They called up to her reassuring things, promises to do what they could. There was a special significant cordiality in their voices, as if they were trying to wish her good luck without saying the words. That made her feel shy, but all the same it was sweet of them to want her to be happy; and anyway they would all have to know quite soon. Probably she would be able to tell them herself, to put it into words. Surely he had meant that. She must see to it that they did not waste their money buying her wedding presents.