The Last September (31 page)

“I just thought I might have helped,” said Francie, in a spent, remote little voice, as though they were both coming back from a funeral to an imposingly vacant house.

“Oh, you have indeed,” said Lois. And she stood there nervously and, she felt, rather gruesomely smiling, weighing her coral beads up and down in a hand, trying to remember what they had both said, what they had meant, what it had been about.

Francie took up her heavy candlestick and looked about for the door. She sighed and said it had been a tiring day. She could not bear to feel she was not missed out after all, had not been passed by because there was nothing to pass her. It was late at night for so fundamental a disappointment. There seemed some difficulty about getting her back to her room, though they both desired this. Lois opened the door; they heard Sir Richard and Hugo arguing up the stairs. Francie shielded her candle-flame with her hand and wavered out round the door like a shadow.

Lois, hot with retrospective embarrassment, slipped from her clothes and blew out the candles quickly. The dark was gratefully positive. She lay on her side with knees drawn up to her chin, blankness snowing down on her till, quite snowed up in blankness, she was asleep.

Next day, mist lay on the fields like a blanket, muffling sound so that the
postman arrived unex
pectedly. He brought a letter from Gerald: “For God’s sake see me.” She meant to go out to meet Gerald, bright and matter-of-fact, but this miscarried: when he came, in the evening, she was half way down from the garden, fighting with Laurence over a snail. He had walked on the snail on purpose.

“Ough—you foul—you beast, Laurence!”

“Well, I didn’t mean to be kind to it.”

“Just because it had no mentality.”

“Not at all.”

“Ough, it’s all over the path.”

“It scrunched … I daresay,” said Laurence, pleased, “I am pathological.”

“Great fat feet!”

As a matter of fact, he was sorry about the snail; he had thought it was just a shell, but he wasn’t going to say so. “Little mother,” he said unpleasantly.

“Laurence, you’re insane. Ough, you’re wiping it off everywhere. I shall be sick.”

“Do.”

“Well, I won’t then.”

“I had no idea you were so fond of animals,” he said as offensively as possible. But he was not feeling up to much this evening and could not think what else to say to her. He turned and walked briskly away towards the avenue, conscious of having no objective. An unusual evening, however, awaited him. In a boreen in the Castle Trent direction he met three armed men coming out of a gate. They made him put up his hands and march smartly down the boreen ahead of them. He discovered that under these conditions the mind works fast but unfruitfully; he noted details sharply and then forgot. When they came to the wall of the graveyard he was embarrassed, but they only asked for his shoes and the loan of his wrist-watch. Placing him with his face close up to the wall they advised him for life’s sake not to look round or stir for twenty minutes. “How shall I know?” said Laurence. “You’ve got my watch.” But they did not care and went away with his shoes. Laurence remained with his forehead against the stone for fifty minutes, horse-flies biting him through the socks. Then he limped home to dinner and an audience, considerably cheered. Three days after, the watch was posted back to his Uncle Richard: it was in excellent order and ticked as it was taken out of the package. “Which just shows,” said Sir Richard, holding the watch to his ear with satisfaction. But that was a day of confusion: nobody listened.

As Lois ran down from the garden, swollen about the personality with annoyance, she saw Gerald waiting at a turn of the path, by a holly tree. He intently watched her advance; without comprehension, as though she had been a picture. Though they were alone, he did not put out a hand or move towards her. He stood there with the vigour, grief and indifference of a tree that cannot help growing.

“Gerald?”

“What’s the matter?” he said, impassive.

“Oh, Laurence walked on a
snail!”

“Bad luck!”

“My dear, he liked it.”

“Queer,” said Gerald, finding the word with difficulty.

“Where shall we go?” she asked, while something in her stopped like a clock with foreboding. The encounter, uncoloured by surprise or passion, left her quite at a loss. Unkissed, her mouth and cheeks felt a touch of ice.

“It seems now,” said Gerald impersonally, as though delivering a message, “that we can’t ever be married.”

“Why? When?” she cried angrily.

Gerald looked at her under level eyelids. She remembered saying: “I wish you wouldn’t keep looking so pleased the whole time.” Now his look and silence were cold with a doomed expectancy: she nearly hated him. Dumbly, in happy-seeming physical agreement like a pair of animals, they wheeled off down the path 
together, crossed the yard rapidly and came into the plantation ribbed with shadow and lanced across with light about the eye-level. He told her her aunt agreed he was not good enough; it would never do at all, her aunt had said. Looking angrily up the tree-trunks, she exclaimed that her aunt was mad. She repeated this with vehemence and confusion, pulling at her fingers. He listened to her in silence, wounded, wounded. She wished they had not come down—overruling, possibly, in each other some desire for space—to the plantation where constricted by firs, thought and movement were difficult and upright shadows emphasised his severity. “She advised me,” Gerald concluded, “to have a frank talk with you.”

“Is this the frank talk now?”

“She was certain you didn’t love me.”

“Gerald
—why weren’t you furious?”

“I … I don’t know,” he said, surprised by the question. She saw him standing confused, like a foreigner with whom by some failure in her vocabulary all communication was interrupted. Her mind halted and she wanted to run away. “Gerald, come back. I’m wretched. Why do we have to talk?”

“I thought you liked that …” Then outside himself with passion, he cried: “I’d rather be dead than not understand.”

“But don’t you
know
I … ? Gerald?”

If he did not know, it would be quite over. She watched with agony what seemed to be his indifference. They were each waiting for the other.
He
watched her hand, on a tree-trunk, pick like a bird at the scaly bark. Her hand, which immediately centred her consciousness of him, paused and became quite rigid, fingers spread out. When he saw her hand so quiet, he would have to be certain. And he immediately said with his usual little resigned inflection: “You see, you are everything.”

“I know,” she said, impersonal.

“I suppose you are what I mean by life … Do you understand at all?”

“You sometimes make me.” She wanted to add: “Touch me now”: it was the only way across. In her impotence, her desolation—among the severe trees—at not being compelled, she made a beseeching movement which he—remote in a rather sublime perplexity that transcended pain—either ignored or rejected. From the stables, the six o’clock bell sent out relief in a jerky, metallic passage of sound through the plantation. She wanted something to look at, to follow: a train curving past in a rush. With an exaggerated movement, she put up her hands to her ears. Gerald’s face, in a band of light, remained impassible.

“Gerald, you’re making us lose each other!” she shouted above the bell.

“But I mean to say: what would
you
lose?”

“Everything.”

“Do you mean that?” A light ran almost visibly up inside him. She saw now where they were, why he had come today.

She thought of going, hesitating with delight, to the edge of an unknown high-up terrace, of Marda, of getting into a train.
“No,”
she cried, terrified, “why should I?”

“Then we don’t mean the same thing.”

“Why don’t you make me … something?”

“I thought I could. I know I can—when I’m not with you.”

“Damn, damn,” said Lois. “I do want you!”

Gerald said piteously: “Then why can’t it all be simple?”

“But it’s our being so young,” she said, too eagerly, “and then, money. I mean, we have got to be practical.”

He explained to her, wide-eyed: “It isn’t anything practical that makes this—like death. What
she
said was, that if you loved me …”

“It’s like a nightmare that even you should begin to talk. I thought you were a rock: I was safe with you. Gerald, really, this is all like a net; little twists of conversation knotted together. One can’t move, one doesn’t know where one is. I really can’t live at all if it has all got to be arranged. I tell you: even what I think isn’t my own, and Mrs. Montmorency comes bursting into my room at nights. Even Marda—nothing we said to each other mattered, it hasn’t stayed, she goes off to get married in a mechanical sort of way. She thinks herself so damned funny—it’s cheap, really. All that matters is what
you
believe—Gerald you’ll kill me, just standing there. You don’t know what it’s like for a snail, being walked on… .”

“I don’t understand you,” he cried in agony. “Who is a snail?”

“I didn’t ask you to understand me: I was so happy. I was so safe.”

Gerald noticed a change somewhere; the light was gone from his face, moving down the trees it had disappeared. He looked at his wrist-watch. They had been a short time together, only twenty minutes. “When were you happy?” he said accurately. He would have liked to be sure of this, and of several other matters: she was not collected enough to explain. He eyed the incredible wood, the path, her unchanged figure in the cheerful blue woollen dress. Something struggled free in his brain and said, quite apart from his numbed self: “My darling, don’t, don’t rack yourself. You know this will be always the same for me. Whatever’s impossible, you will always be perfect. I know we’re different about things: if that didn’t hurt you it would never matter to me. I mean, don’t let’s be disappointed. You know I’m not giving you
up:
I could never have done that. But it’s just that, you see, you never … I suppose things can’t come out what one wants … I suppose it would hardly do. …”

“But, Gerald, where
are
we?”

He said: “Don’t worry.” They were both, he knew, entirely lost.

“But what have I done? What have I not done?” After a minute, during which she heard him finger his belt—his fingers slipped on the leather—she shut her eyes and said, “So you’re certain I don’t love you?”

No answer. “Oh, leave that belt alone, Gerald!”

Still no answer, as though he were asleep. And indeed he felt, as at the approach of sleep, an immense indifference. She, tortured by the loneliness of insomnia, had to cry out: “Won’t you even just try— won’t you just kiss me?”

“I don’t think …”

“All right.”

“Look, I must go now.” Vaguely, he saluted and began to go up the path, towards the beech walk, towards the house.

“Goodbye?” she said.

He only half paused. “No, don’t let’s …”

“Where did you leave your bicycle?”

He was well up the path; he called back. “Against the hedge. You know, under the tennis courts.”

She knew; she remembered him pulling leaves from the privet hedge, scattering them on the grass and throwing them over her. She remembered that Mrs.

Boatley was a Christian Scientist. It was a good thing summer was practically over; there might not be more tennis parties. But at this the incomprehensible glare of summer blinded her, bringing tears to her eyes.
“Gerald!”
she called.

But by this time he seemed to be out of earshot.

ANOTHER 
thing Lady Naylor had noticed about the English was a disposition they had to be socially visible before midday.

Soon after ten, she had heard, Mrs. Vermont and her friends were to be seen about the streets of Clonmore—from behind the still decently somnolent blinds of inhabitants—with gloves buttoned tight at the wrists, swinging coloured baskets. Before eleven, they would be seated behind the confectioner’s window, deploring the coffee. Mrs. Rolfe had once had Moriarty’s shutters taken down for her specially— and she wishful, Moriarty said, to purchase the one pair of stockings only. A Mrs. Peake, of the Gunners, demanded attention at the hair-dresser’s before ten. These unnatural practices were a strain on the town’s normality; the streets had a haggard look, ready for anything. Really, as Lady Naylor said, almost English. She thought of the south of England as a kind of extension of Eastbourne, the north—serrated by factory chimneys, the middle—a blank space occupied by Anna Partridge. Only Danielstown’s being out of dropping or popping in distance from Clonmore de
prived her, as it transpired, of matutinal visits from Mrs. Vermont and her friends.

Mrs. Vermont, however, overcame difficulties, hired a Ford and had herself driven over one morning about eleven o’clock. She brought her great friend Mrs. Rolfe; they were on their way to lunch at the Thompsons’. This she explained before they were out of the car;
she
knew what Mondays were, she did not want to alarm Lady Naylor—being so much with Mother had made her considerate in these matters. Lady Naylor, as a matter of fact, would have minded them less at lunch time, one didn’t notice people so much at meals, she discovered. When news of the dropping in came down to the kitchen, she groaned: “My morning!” Nothing could have been worse.