The Last September (27 page)

Steps in the anteroom: she slipped the letter under the blotter and turned round consciously. “I hear you are back,” said Lady Naylor, entering. “I hear it was such a success that they broke the gramophone. Now I want to hear all about it.” She sat down.

“Well, to begin with—”

“One moment—have you unpacked your frock?”

“Oh! I left my suitcase … I went up to Laurence to borrow a German grammar.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t go on with German,” said Lady Naylor, “it still offends so many people; Italian is prettier and more practical. I could lend you
II Piccolo Mondo Antico,
or Dante—However, tell me about the dance.”

“Well, first of all—”

“—By the way, I’ve just heard from Marda. She has arrived quite safely, I’m glad to say. She says Kent is dull, which I daresay it would be, but of course she is glad to be with Leslie.”

“Did she say so?”

“She naturally would be. You can read it; I’ve got the letter downstairs— Who broke the gramophone? I hope you weren’t anywhere round when it happened: these things are always remembered. Were the Raltes there? Did they look pretty? I wonder, really, at their mother allowing them; she professes to have them in such control. However, I daresay this will be the last of these dances.”

“Oh, why?”

“If you had heard what we heard at the Trents’ … There was a man there from Kerry. He really made us feel quite uncomfortable. Though, as your uncle said afterwards, one knows what the Trents’ friends
are:
everything happens to them. However— were the Vermonts there?
She
would be quite in her element. And Mr. Armstrong? I hear he and Livvy were seen in Cork together at the Imperial, by Mrs. Foxe-O’Connor. And the young man who was here to lunch, who talked so much—in the armoured car— oh—Lesworth.”

“Yes, he was there.”

“I am surprised at them all having time,” said Lady Naylor. “However, if they danced more and interfered less, I daresay there would be less trouble in the country. It appears that in Kerry …” Her voice became colder with inattention and dwindled away. Lois was certain she eyed the pink blotter. This zigzag approach to Gerald, this ultimate vagueness, were sinister. Lady Naylor, after some moments of odd and oppressive silence, observed that the sweet peas were dying. “The water must be unhealthy, it’s going green. In fact, all the flowers need doing. Perhaps after tea— How would you like to go to a school of art?”

“Marvellous,” said Lois, after reflection.

“Francie was very much struck by your drawings. And Marda said you certainly needed an interest.”

“Oh. Was she discussing me?”

“We were all saying that girls needed interests and I thought she seemed to agree particularly. She has not made much of her life so far—though of course if she marries Leslie—and I’ve always thought that music or drawing, or writing a little, or organisation of some kind—”

“Did Marda say what she thought of my drawings?”

“She seemed to think they were nice— A quarter to five!” exclaimed Lady Naylor reproachfully. “The tea will be cold … You look sleepy, Lois. Did you hear the Montmorencys are going to build a bungalow?”

“Here?”

“Don’t be silly— Besides, according to that friend of the Trents, it would be blown up or burnt in a month or two. Certainly,” said Lady Naylor looking out at the sky, “I call this a tiring day.” She got up with a sigh.

Later that evening Lois, half way up to the garden with scissors and basket, overtook Mr. Montmorency walking all by himself up the shrubbery path. Pulling leaves from the laurels, he shredded them carefully.

“I hear,” he said, as she came up alongside, “you are taking up German?”

“Unless Italian might be more practical … I hear you are going to build a bungalow.”

“Oh, I don’t know; that is chiefly Francie’s idea.” They walked in silence, she dragging her basket against the laurels. They had not been alone since the drive from Mount Isabel. She remembered how once she had hoped so much, and how he had been infinitely disobliging. Now she had a tenderness for him, devoid of attraction, as though they had been a couple of widows.

“No stairs would be nice.”

“But it would be certain to have other disadvantages.”

“Apparently,” she said with effrontery, “Marda arrived quite safely.”

“It should be a surprise to us all,” said Hugo, sarcastic, “that she has not fallen out of the train. Even she cannot think of anything better to say to a hostess. And the information, I always feel certain, leaves hostesses cold. Once one is clear of their gates, interest ends with responsibility.”

“And she says Kent is dull.”

“I cannot believe
she
finds it so.”

“She is frightfully philosophic. Perhaps she was dull here.” (She thought: “Even now, shall we never be natural?”)

“Have you seen her letter?”

“No … have you?”

“No, your aunt has lost it.”

He pushed open the door, then followed her into the garden which, deep in its walls, seemed impossibly large, for one could not see to the end of it: it was crossed by espaliers and crowded with apple trees. Down the borders, the
September yellows and scarlets
were metallic in unsunny light. Dahlias, orange and wine-coloured, blazed and gloomed. He turned down one path, she kept to the other; they silently parted. Here she had come with Marda—never with Gerald— they had sat on the green seat, pressed blisters out of the paint and spat out their plum stones into the box border opposite. Entered today, the usual breath of the garden was cold to her face. The branches were

quiet as though in anxiety, the flowers appeared to be clamouring vainly, forgotten. Coming to the hedge of sweet pea she began at the purple end, diligently. “Though myself,” she could not help saying, “I do not care for purple sweet pea.”

When she reached up to the top of the hedge her sleeves fell back from her arms and she thought of Gerald. She felt him looking at her through the thinning stems. The sweet peas were practically over, and indeed she was glad, she thought, snipping and tugging with blunt garden scissors. In yesterday’s dusk, the square with its flitter of leaves had been all autumnal; smoke was blue in the air and, later, the dark where they kissed had a sharp intimation of autumn. She loved in autumn a stronger, more shadowy keen spring, sweet shocks of goodbye, transition. Summer meanwhile stayed on inside these walls, forgotten.

The fact was, that though she determined tonight to sit close to the lamp and learn verbs, Italian or German would not dispose of last night, which remained, like the tear in her green tulle dress, to be dealt with practically. After an anxious glance at the possible, a pain so sharp that it seemed to her like her own forbade recantation. It was inevitable that she should marry Gerald. Mrs. Montmorency at least—she thought with relief as she came to the red sweet pea—would be infinitely sympathetic and pleased. The unbelievable future became fixed as the past under the flutter and settling down of a flock of comments, which, as she turned in imagination back to the house and steps and saw lips forming themselves in unconscious readiness, seemed already uttered. And as Mr. Montmorency came up a path at an angle, with the two garden kittens toppling after him, she was surprised he did not repeat: “Well, I hope of course that you may be happy. And decision of any kind is an excellent thing in your mother’s daughter.”

Instead, he came to the other side of the hedge and, picking off some bleaching tendrils, observed that the sweet peas would soon be over. The house flowers must keep her busy, he added. And taking out his pocket knife he cut three sweet peas, with precision. Having made his gesture of sympathy, he continued to move with her down his side of the hedge.

“It is extraordinary,” said Lois, “I feel as if I had been away for a week.”

“Yet you find us going on much the same?” He looked at her through the stems ironically but without intelligence. And she could not try to explain the magnetism they all exercised by their being static. Or how, after every return—or awakening, even, from sleep or preoccupation—she and these home surroundings still further penetrated each other mutually in the discovery of a lack.

LADY NAYLOR
, who wished for clear, steady light these lengthening evenings, saw to the lamps personally. In big yellow gloves she accurately trimmed the wicks, between the morning’s headlines and a thorough talk with the cook. But the smell of oil was repugnant to her and now she said with some sharpness:

“You have no conception of love— You are in my light.”

Lois moved from the lamp-room window. “I really have,” she said, “really.”

“Nonsense,” her aunt said, looking round for a rag. Lois began to slide a matchbox about, and her aunt, taking the matches away mechanically, thought how hard it was that a woman like this, who could bring the matter on to an intellectual plane at once, should have to do lamps at all. Anna Partridge, whose brain was all shreddy with rabbit-combing and raffia, had had electric light for years, just from living in England, and even the Trents talked of harnessing their waterfall.

“When I was your age I never thought of marriage 
at all. I didn’t intend to marry. I remember, when I was nineteen I was reading Schiller.”

“I don’t think about marriage, I—”

“Then you can have no conception—”

“I read,” said Lois with dignity.

“Girls nowadays do nothing but lend each other these biological books. I was intensely interested in art.”

“But, Aunt Myra, young men are quite usual.”

“It all comes of dancing and all this excitement.”

“But Gerald is not excitable; he was in love with me the other day before lunch.”

“He was half asleep,” said Lady Naylor. “At the best of times he has not much conversation. Of course, I rate brains so highly; perhaps I am wrong. But remember, you cannot hope to be always in love, and then …”

“But you said I had no conception …”

“There you are, in my light again.”

Lois moved further away from the window. She wished she had not started this explanation. She had felt, somehow, that it should be less embarrassing in the lamp-room. She thought of Gerald’s unquestioning shoulder, where she would lean her head. “But I can’t explain,” she said. “I never heard of a girl being asked to explain. I always thought …”

“Real
feeling
explains itself,” said Lady Naylor, and
polished some oil off the base of a lamp triumphantly.

“But if he comes to tea …”

“Oh, we cannot help that, of course.”

“But if he spoke to Uncle Richard …”

“Your uncle would be very much worried. Really, Lois, I do think you might be more sensible and considerate.”

Lois saw this point of view only too perfectly. She 
wrinkled her forehead. She did not want to be hard on her Uncle Richard and she could not help sympathising with Aunt Myra, who had so much to organise as it was. Feeling did seem to her out of proportion with life, and that this disproportion should be so evident generally, that her aunt should think she was making an irrelevant fuss, strongly discouraged her. But she reassembled herself; she had been led to understand that love… .

“But surely love …”

“You have no conception of love,” repeated Lady Naylor, and thought again of electric light in Bedfordshire.

“But shall I never do anything?”

“Go to a school of art.”

“Where?”

“It could be arranged.”

“But I don’t think I really draw well.”

“That is no reason why you should marry.”

It was, of course, no reason; acknowledging this and seeing light from the barred window fall so coldly on the oil-cloth top of the lamp-table Lois felt quite at a standstill.

“However . .” said Lady Naylor. She looked with her brilliant eyes dubiously, almost shyly, at the door behind Lois’s head. She swept the rags and the lamp scissors into a drawer, shut the drawer on their malodour, and pulled off her gloves, sighing. She saw life perhaps as a shuffle of setting to partners, then a drawn-out, directed but somehow solitary curtsying, to him, the other, the rest of the eight. “However …” she said. And the qualification committed herself and her niece, a shade alarmingly. Lois knew that Gerald might come to tea.

“You do see,” said Lois, and stared at her aunt’s ringed hands which reappeared from the gloves, “that I didn’t want to be clandestine?”

“Oh, of course you were quite right,” said Lady Naylor without enthusiasm. She went down to talk to the cook.

Kathleen, the cook, who resembled her mistress in personality so closely that their relation was an affair of balance, who had more penetration than Lady Naylor and was equally dominant, inferred much of the situation from her mistress’s manner. Herself, she had felt this was bound to occur. For an hour or so, they had countered each other amiably in the limewashed gloom of the kitchen, over a basin of green-pea soup. Lady Naylor announced with unusual deprecation, there would be an officer coming over to tea. Kathleen, refolding her hands royally, asked, would she slap up a sally lunn? On the whole, Lady Naylor thought dropcakes. Kathleen immediately placed the officer. Strolling down the yard in the course of the afternoon to execute a couple of chickens, she watched dispassionately from under the chestnuts Gerald crouch on his motor bicycle up the avenue. Lois, standing about with the dogs, went down to meet him. For tea, Kathleen sent up an unaccountable iced cake, ironically festive.