The Edwardians (5 page)

Why on earth, he asked himself, returning to actuality, had he accepted the duchess' invitation to stay till after luncheon?

Then he remembered: the children. He liked young people, and furthermore he had been curious to see this household left to itself, when the flock of macaws and magpies had retreated. He began to look forward to lunching alone with the duchess and the boy and girl. He had been put next to the girl yesterday, and although he had not been able to get many words out of her, he had been interested by the shy, trapped look in her eyes. The boy, too—a handsome, angry boy. There was a resemblance between the brother and sister. But that was only youth, he thought; they would very soon be broken in. The pressure on them would be too strong. What else could be expected of them? He lay in his comfortable bed, and allowed the warm luxurious silence of Chevron to sink into his bones.

The duchess, also lying in bed, was thinking pleasantly of Leonard Anquetil. It was now some months since she had begun to tell Harry Tremaine that she was tired of him, and she was wondering whether Anquetil would make a good substitute. But could she force Anquetil on her acquaintances? Yes, surely—they might grumble, but she knew she was a power: they would tolerate any of her whims, even if they jibbed at first. (That Anquetil himself might decline to conform never entered her head.) She was glad she had asked him to Chevron. He was rather a rough diamond; he had led a terrible life, poor boy, and it must be a nice change for him (after that ice-hut) to come to a comfortable house and enjoy the society of civilised people. It was nice to give people a treat. Lucy was filled with a sudden benevolence. She could make Anquetil very happy. She would spoil him. She was sure he had never been to the Opera; or, at least, only in the gallery. She was sure he had no cuff links; or only bone ones. True, he did not shine in conversation, but then, in compensation, he had the kind of personality that made you conscious all the time of his presence;' nor was he good-looking, though he reminded her rather of one of the pictures upstairs—not at all a modern face; that, in itself, had a certain distinction; she must ask Sebastian which picture it was, so that she might instance it, if anyone made derogatory remarks. He was very dark, even sallow, with two puffs of frizzy black hair standing out from either temple, bright black eyes, and a sword-cut running from chin to ear. A startling face; pocked, moreover, by little blue freckles, where a charge of gunpowder had exploded, as though an amateur tattooist had gone mad and had made freckles with his needle instead of making an anchor, or a monogram, or crossed cutlasses, whatever it might be. It would increase her reputation for originality if she calmly imposed Anquetil upon the world, her world, as her lover. “Amant de coeur,” she murmured, stretching her limbs between the linen sheets and forgetting her original impulse of benevolence.

Lucy seldom came down until luncheon, but this morning she wandered into the garden at midday, a lacy parasol slanting between her fair head and the sun. The silence of the house oppressed her, nor had she been able to find Anquetil either in the solar or in the library, and, spoilt, she was already out of temper at not having found him where she had expected to find him. Her heels made little round marks as she sauntered across the turf. Miss Wace watched her from an upper window, with feelings compounded of resentment and adoration. How neat the duchess looks this morning, to be sure, she reflected, in that tailor-made which shows off her figure to such advantage, and which indicates that she is going to London, after the muslins of Sunday; but still she keeps the country touch in her parasol, and has perched no hat as yet on the curves of her coiffure. Miss Wace, who herself affected a dress of heliotrope serge with a stiff petersham belt, and who scraped her hair angrily back from her ears, lived in a constant dilemma between disapproval of Lucy's frivolity, and rapturous fascination before her femininity. She never could grow accustomed to this being who at one moment would goad one into such a paroxysm of indignation as could culminate only in giving one's immediate notice, and who next moment would charm one into such a state of subjection that one would gladly have sat up all night, boiling hot milk against the hour when a tired Lucy would be pleased to go to bed. Some people, thought Miss Wace, working herself up, think that everything is permitted them; for although she found great satisfaction in formulas she had never quite arrived at the formula that everybody imposes their own valuation. It was impossible to take serious exception to anything the duchess said, she thought now, as she watched Lucy twirling her parasol, a coloured butterfly flitting across the grass; impossible to be really offended; but then again she remembered how Lucy had flown at her for something that was really not her fault, and she decided that sooner or
later the day must come when she would pack her boxes and go. “There is such a thing as self-respect,” was one of her favourite phrases. In her heart of hearts she knew perfectly well that she would cease to exist—would peter out—away from the thrilling and dangerous excitement of Lucy's proximity; and besides, she knew equally well that she would never bring herself to leave a house where the King came so often. “I am not a snob, my dear,” she was fond of confiding to an intimate friend; “I pride myself on that, I simply don't know the meaning of snobbishness, I am indeed a Republican and proud of it,” and it was only with a great show of reluctance that she could be induced to describe the latest royal visit. “Such a terrible lot of extra work it means for me,” she would sigh, and then she would go on to relate how she must look into every detail, even to seeing that the strip of red drugget was properly laid across the court and the Royal Standard ready to be substituted for the ordinary flag on the tower. “You would think the servants by now were accustomed to this sort of thing—six visits we had, I think, last year—but would you believe it, something is always forgotten.” It was fair to assume, however, that there were compensations for her extra trouble, for upon the left side of her thin and Republican bosom hung a mauve enamel watch from a true lover's knot of mauve enamel ribbon. “I have to wear it face outwards,” she would explain, “because of the initials on the back. So silly. Such a pity. It would have been so much nicer plain,” and then she would turn the watch over and display the interlaced E.R. VII, and the crown on the back. “Of course I don't
like
it,” she would say, “but it's a good little timekeeper, and so I wear it.” In point of fact everybody knew that it was not a good little timekeeper at all, but gained about an hour a day.

Lucy disappeared round the corner of the house and Miss Wace went severely back to her accounts. Lucy was not looking for Anquetil, or at any rate she did not acknowledge to herself that she was; she was merely strolling in the garden. But she found. Anquetil where she least expected him—in the summer-house talking to Viola. The summer-house served as an outdoor schoolroom; the walls were scribbled over with sums and childish drawings, the table-edge carved into scollops by an idle penknife. Annoyance surged up in Lucy, which she rapidly attributed to the fact that Viola was looking so plain. According to Lucy's ideas, the child was looking her very worst, for Lucy liked her hair to be frizzed out and tied with a large black bow, also she liked her to wear girlish frocks, fussed over with little ruches and trimmings; but today Viola's hair was straight and sleek, and lay like black satin against her forehead, making her small face yet paler and more oval; also she wore a severe red dress, which in Lucy's opinion became her not at all. Her hair was curled yesterday, thought Lucy, and the weather is dry; she must have been putting water on it. Lucy, with her taste for fidgety ornament and the feminine graces of the piquante woman, was incapable of appreciating her daughter's smooth line and glossy delicacy. The child had good eyes, she admitted that; and there was something to be said for her winged eyebrows, that always looked as though they had been brushed over with oil;
but why must she be as pale as a saint and do her hair like the Madonna.

Both Anquetil and Viola looked up as the duchess came round the corner, for she threw a shadow between them and the sun. Lucy knew instantly that she was in the way. This small circumstance increased her annoyance beyond all measure; she might have forgiven another woman, say Sylvia Roehampton, for engaging Anquetil's attention so easily and lightly in the summer-house with the dragonflies darting over the flowers in the sunk garden, for then she could have entered into rivalry with the other woman and they would both have begun to spar with weapons whose use they well understood; but Viola she could not forgive for having crept into Anquetil's confidence, so to speak, by the back door. It was because Viola was a child, of course, that Anquetil had unbent to her, he who had stood so on his guard from Saturday to Monday. Innocence had succeeded where skill had failed. But she pretended to be surprised to see him there, and said, “Dear me, Mr. Anquetil! Why, I thought you were still sleeping off the effects of your bridge last night. What a lovely morning, isn't it? I so enjoy a little quiet walk before luncheon. I do hope, Viola, you haven't been boring Mr. Anquetil. And what about your lessons, my dear child? Surely you ought to have been doing those? Why, the table is littered with your books. What
will
Miss Watkins say? I must really take you away, Mr. Anquetil, and let Viola go on with her lessons, or the poor child will get into trouble—I always wonder whether Miss Watkins isn't a little
too
strict, but one doesn't like to interfere too often; governesses have their own methods, haven't they? and it's scarcely fair to make them feel one doesn't trust them.”

Anquetil had been waiting for a chance to speak, and now he took it. “That's quite all right, duchess. I am the culprit. I squared Miss Watkins, on condition that I might tell Viola stories till luncheon. I explained that it would be good for her geography. And it has, hasn't it, Viola? What she doesn't know now about the Orinoco isn't worth knowing. That's the way to learn geography,” he went on, seeing that Lucy was about to speak; “talk to somebody who's been there instead of learning paragraphs out of a repulsive little primer like this. Or spend an hour with a globe. Now you, duchess, couldn't tell me what places you would pass through if you drew a line round the world on the latitude of Madrid. Try!”

The duchess was amazed; this was a very different Anquetil from the hard, unwilling man she had tried to lionise and whom she had thought she might eventually conquer. He sparkled; he was laughing at her. Viola watched them both, between alarm and fascination. Anquetil's presence gave her an extraordinary support; she knew, somehow, that her mother would not lose her temper before him. Afterwards . . . but her mother was going to London after luncheon, and by the end of the week, when she came back, she would have forgotten.

Lucy intercepted Sebastian in the library before luncheon. She put on her fondling manner, smoothing back his hair in the way he particularly disliked. Suave though she was, he knew that something had occurred to put her in an ill humour; he knew, too, that her first remarks were but a preliminary to what she really wanted to say. So he was not surprised when she finally said, “Oh, by the way, about Mr. Anquetil . . .” Which picture upstairs, she wanted to know, was so like Mr. Anquetil? She had been too lazy to go upstairs and look for it. But Sebastian knew the pictures so much better than she did. He knew so much more about Chevron altogether. Which picture was it? An ugly man, Mr. Anquetil; but not an entirely uninteresting face—didn't Sebastian agree?—that funny scar, those funny blue freckles, those funny puffs of hair. Not a modern face. He might be hanging among all those historical Tudor portraits in the Brown Gallery, all in the same frames, with their names written on festoons swooping from corner to corner: Drake, Howard, Raleigh—which was it? “No particular picture,” said Sebastian; “he's like any Elizabethan sailor.” “Any Elizabethan pirate,” said Lucy “Most Elizabethan sailors were pirates,” said Sebastian. Lucy laughed her most silvery laugh, the laugh that had made several men believe that she understood what they said.

Lucy had arranged in her own mind that Anquetil should accompany her to London, but to her intense irritation this plan was thwarted, not by Viola, but by Sebastian, who surprisingly proposed that Anquetil should come for a ride with him in the afternoon and take an evening train. Sebastian had never been known to do such a thing before—usually he did nothing but express his impatience that everyone should clear out
of Chevron as early as possible—so that his mother's dismay was equalled only by her astonishment. She was now filled by the unpleasant suspicion that she herself was
de trop,
and that Anquetil, no less than her own children, looked forward to the hour of her departure, when they might all three be left alone together. Still, she doted too much upon Sebastian to resent even the consequences of anything he might do; if scapegoat there must be, that scapegoat should be Viola. Should she take Viola to London with her? she wondered; pretending to herself that she would then have the girl handy if she wanted a safety valve for her ill humour—for thus far she could be frank with herself—but refusing to acknowledge that her real wish was to prevent any growth of the companionship between Anquetil and Viola. Then she decided that it would be too much of a bore to have Viola in London. She felt uneasy sometimes under the girl's unspoken criticism, and in London, she knew, the house would be full of people at all hours of the day, people at whom the girl would glance once before going out of the room—let them stay together; she washed her hands of Anquetil; fool that she had been, even to have thought of him! She would take Wacey with her instead. Still, she had been baffled; she took the thought away to London with her, as irritating as a stone in the shoe.