The Last September (24 page)

“Oh, take care,” wailed Denise, “mind my draperies!” She freed an end of the muslin and, as no one listened, began with angry laughter to pepper them all with floor-powder. The D.I.’s niece looked at Daventry queerly and suddenly: their eyes were now on a level. His eyes, dark with fatigue and nervousness, were set in too close together, like a good-looking shark’s.

Cicely Ralte yawned slightly; the struggle did not abate. “We shall all be tired when it comes to tonight,” she said to the adjutant.

But he said: “Here comes Miss Farquar, looking as fresh as paint.”

Lois came to the door with David Armstrong. Livvy would not come up to the hut till this evening, she would be confused, she feared; she didn’t know how much they knew. She was down in Clonmore now, buying sophisticated-looking black pansies to wear on her dress. She and Lois were spending the night in Clonmore, with the Fogartys. Lois was dazed still after her long drive under the flat white sunless sky. Sir Richard and Lady Naylor had viewed her departure with the gloomiest apprehensions, but Francie had insisted she would enjoy herself. It must be dull for her these few days, Francie said, after Marda had gone. And she had slipped a sachet of Californian Poppy into the top of the suitcase, with Lois’s green tulle dress.

Lois and David looked through the door at the young men all in a tangle with a sensation of helplessness, as though it devolved on themselves to unwind them. Then they stepped in and shook hands with Mrs. Rolfe and her girl friends. Lois, pleasing the adjutant by her freshness, wore a light blue felt hat and a blue cardigan. She suspected she should not be walking about the camp without a chaperon but could not see how to avoid this: she had come up here to look for Mrs. Vermont. She went pink from the heat of the room and felt Mr. Daventry look at her, then shut his eyes again. There was a desperation about Mr. Daventry she could have loved. But he apparently craved relaxation: she had found she did not relax Mr. Daventry.

Gerald was not here—she guessed from their eyes of commiseration. He was a serious dancer and did not care to tire himself by sliding. Possibly he was on duty, possibly would be waiting at Mrs. Fogarty’s. Now, she could remember nothing of him but the leg he had drawn so tenderly into the armoured car. She had heard nothing of him from that moment; he might have been sealed up permanently in tin, like a lobster. Did he regret the kiss?—he had not added a word to it.

Mr. Simcox, the fattest and sweetest of all the Gunners, started the gramophone with an eye on herself and came to ask for a dance. He looked so hot, she said she would rather wait till the evening. “Remember,” said Mr. Simcox, spreading a hand on his heart. And by some mysterious
evocation, the hut, lit up,
vibrated, the air was warm like smoke on her cool arm, as she went throbbing along with Gerald, feeling his hand on her back through her thin dress—too near to see each other—his lashes reverent by her hair. She thought she need not worry about her youth; it wasted itself spontaneously, like sunshine elsewhere or firelight
in
an empty room.

She thanked Mr. Simcox and said she would keep 
number six and would not lose count. Mrs. Vermont, looking tired suddenly, said it was tea-time and shooed the young men out of the hut like chickens. They dispersed through the mud in the tired, wise light of the afternoon.

That evening a wind came up. Lois and Livvy dressed in Mrs. Fogarty’s spare-room, stumbling round the edge of the large bed. They took turns at the looking-glass; in the intervals of their toilet they ran to the window to look out. It was strange and pleasant to Lois to be in a town again. The square, where some crisp leaves whirled autumnly, was pervaded by an excitement. Though only twelve couples had been invited to Mrs. Rolfe’s dance all Clonmore seemed to know of it. People kept coming out quickly through the swing doors of the Imperial. Someone played half a waltz and broke off, discouraged; two commercial travellers clapped one another on the shoulder. Livvy pinned the black pansies under her bosom and turned to invite admiration. Lois thought the pansies looked common but, knowing they must have cost four-and-six, said they were most original. Lois’s green tulle dress slipped over her head like a cataract. She shone, coming out through the top of it. If only Marda could see her … It was half-past six: she had promised herself to think of Marda.

They were dressing early, they were to dine with a Mrs. Perkins up in the huts. Mrs. Perkins could not promise there would be much for dinner, but after all this was Ireland and it would be rather jolly.

Captain Vermont was to call for them: they buttoned their overcoats over their ball-dresses. Mrs. Fogarty kissed them half way downstairs and warned them not to break hearts. She would see them later, she was coming to watch the dance.

Since the acquisition of Betty, Captain Vermont’s stock of conversation to pretty young things had given out naturally; biologically the time was past for it. They walked rather silently up past the barracks and picked their way over the mud between the huts. A chill of darkness was coming down on the air. The wind came, knife-like, down through the lines of huts from the mountain, over a gulf of land where the farms were dark—apprehensive, the young girls patted the whorls of their hair. The Perkins’s hut exposed a flank to the wind; it was chilly, one slipped one’s bare arms out of one’s coat reluctantly, going to table.

The dinner was not so jolly as Lois had feared. Mrs. Perkins looked distrait and had a whispered argument with her husband about a tin-opener. Mrs. Vermont could talk of nothing but poor Denise. (“As though,” said Livvy, “she were having at least a baby instead of only a dance.”) Captain Perkins and Captain Vermont apologised repeatedly to the girls for being so old and married; their wives told them not to be silly. Their wives said the girls could perfectly well see there was no room for young men here; already their six chairs grated against the matchwood boarding. The girls would have young men in the course of the evening. Lois agreed politely, but Livvy wished they had stayed to dinner down in Clonmore, where one could have
at least watched
Mr.
Fogarty
drink. She sat squinting, watching the wasted powder flake off her nose.

A bottle of white wine was divided among the ladies with depressing impartiality; the men drank whisky. Mrs. Perkins’s pince-nez glittered with more animation. But the wind like a lunatic fidgeted with the hut, frames creaked, doors rattled, a shudder went down the walls; a gust through a crack set the lights de
mentedly swinging. During a strained little silence, between two laughs of the wind, Mrs. Vermont observed that an angel must be passing over the house; she asked them to listen for its wings. They listened; they thought of the empty country blotted out by the darkness. “Quiet here, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Perkins.

“Better not circulate too far between the dances,” said Captain Perkins, “and don’t go down to the wires. It’s dark, for one thing; we don’t want any of these girls lost.”

“Grandpa!” said Mrs. Vermont. Livvy noted, there seemed some communal feeling between the married: any wife could be faintly rude to anyone else’s husband. ”
don’t go for walks between dances,” said Livvy bridling.

“You don’t know what you’ll do
nowl”
said Mrs. Vermont, and they all laughed.

Lois was anxious, there was a tight little ball in her throat; she could hardly swallow. She was always “strung-up” before a dance. But tonight it was worse; she had not the expectation of being claimed: she was really doubtful. She had not had a word from Gerald, he hadn’t been round to the Fogartys. Was she not nice to kiss? Was he disappointed? Her green frock glinted under the light; she kept looking down at her breast, and into her lap where the folds ran off in shadow under the table. If he were not there when she came, if she did not see him before he saw her (as she came up hill in the dark) standing full in pink light inside the door, staring eagerly on to the slab of darkness that was to give her up—she should die, she thought. For this morning she had written to Viola that she intended to marry Gerald.

THE ROLFES’ door swung open and shut; bursts from the gramophone came downhill like somebody coughing. As the Perkins’s party stepped up from the duckboards Gerald spun past the door with the D.I.’s niece in a nimbus of draperies. The room was sticky with strawberry light, unlit lanterns wobbled between the electric light cords; the dancers seemed to be moving slowly in jam. A group of young men stood by the door, coughing. But one hadn’t yet made one’s official appearance: Lois blinked and began to pull out her silver shoes from her pockets: somebody pulled her on down a passage to change.

In what Denise called the kitchenette at the end of the passage the five spare men were smoking, looking into their glasses of whisky and wishing to play bridge. Lois looked in and they all waved to her, but Livvy pulled her away quickly: she said that must be the gentlemen’s cloak-room. Lois met, with surprise, her own eyes of interrogation in six inches of mirror between the coats.

David came to claim Livvy, Betty went swooning off over the chalky lake of the floor with Mr. Simcox, Mr. Daventry stared at the passage door with severity, balanced his cigarette on the rim of the gramophone and came up to Lois and frowned, without speaking. He opened his arms slowly. They danced; she had no idea she could dance so beautifully. At the end of the record Mr. Daventry impassively put back the needle again. “Tiring day,” he said.

“Oh, I don’t think so.” They went on dancing.

The D.I.’s niece picked off ends of her tangerine draperies from various parts of Gerald and walked away with an aquiline-looking gunner. Over Lois’s temple Mr. Daventry’s jaw moved slightly; his neck muscles strained. Again he revived the gramophone. Lois, breathless, said: “Isn’t there going to be an interval?” “Not necessarily,” replied Mr. Daventry. Meanwhile, one wall of the hut seemed propped against Gerald’s rigid, resentful back.

“What a crowd… .”

“I beg your pardon?”

She did not speak again. Anxiously dancing, she merely constituted Mr. Daventry’s revenge. Mrs. Vermont, going past Gerald, said: “Oh, diddums?” She asked Mr. Simcox if he had noticed, nice-looking boys looked their nicest sulky? Mr. Simcox, looking round so carefully that he missed a step, said he would not call that sulky … More worried.

“Nonsense, Tubby, what’s he got to worry about?”

“You never know.”

Mr. Simcox was a bit of a philosopher, because he was so fat. He gave up Mrs. Vermont with a sigh to another young man and went across for somebody’s young, shy sister. “No luck?” he said on the way, to Gerald. And Gerald looked at him candidly, with despair.

The evening “went” with a rush, with a kind of high impetuousness out of everybody’s control. Everyone looked and spoke and danced close up with a kind of exalted helplessness; intimacy tightened the very air. Sandwiches were ambrosia, brightening the eyes; rims of plates were electric where fingers touched. Mrs. Rolfe laughed all the time, you would have said with despair. She climbed past couples very close up at the darkest part of the passage, she entered the kitchenette with a shriek and swept some cards from the table. The spare men danced with each other. She ran in and out of her bedroom, shaking a plate of chocolates at the couples sitting out on the chest-o’-drawers and on the washstand covered with Turkish cushions. If the hut had risen and soared up into the air, so that someone stepping out at the door had to step back dizzily, she would hardly have been surprised. Indeed, two subalterns running down to the mess for more siphons did leap to the mud as from a great height.

The room was hot; they drew the curtains back and opened the windows; and were stared in at oddly by hard little squares of night. Couples went out for walks, to cool their faces. Livvy was kissed twice and went off to powder her chin. “Of course, this is postwar madness,” said Mr. Simcox, standing beside a window.

“Oh yes,” said Lois.

“Awful, really …
I
expect
you
understand what I mean.”

“Oh yes.” Wishing Mr. Simcox were not intrigued, she put her two hands out of the window, as into a well, to feel wind cold on her wrists. Gerald came up behind her.

“Mine next,” he said, as though they had just parted. “What a row!” he yelled.

“This jazzing,” said Simcox. “They ought to have let me bring my band,” said Gerald, “it wouldn’t have taken up much more room than Mrs. Fogarty.”

Mrs. Fogarty had indeed come in and sat at the end of the room in a purple tea-gown. Her circumference was enormous, her feet stuck out beyond it—but she was such a darling. Every time a couple stumbled over her feet she beamed and nodded in the friendliest way. She had just whispered to Gerald, who brought her a glass of lemonade: “Here, where’s your girl?” And her eyes had rolled at him, dark with anxiety. Gerald could not have borne to disappoint Mrs. Fogarty.

Gerald did not dance silently. His hand supported her wrist, cool and familiar. Lois felt she was home again safe from deserted rooms, the penetration of silences, rain, homelessness. Nothing mattered: she could have gone to sleep. But he woke her.

“Look here, what have I done?”

“How—?” said she, quite inadequate.

“You
know.
But why are you—why must we—?”

“Gerald—oh, do be—ssh!”

A couple sheered off from them.

“I didn’t think you’d be cruel,” he said to her hair, almost confidentially.