The Last September (33 page)

“Percy, where did he—how was he—?”

“Through the head.”

“Then it didn’t—?”

“Oh, no. Probably instantaneous.”

“Oh, don’t! Oh, Percy, how can you!”

Denise repeated: “I can’t believe it.” And while the others queerly, furtively stared, she tried to press from her hair the waves she had had put in that morning. “You know, I can’t believe it. Can you, Betty? It’s so … extraordinary.”

“Why can’t we all go home? Why did we stay here? Why don’t we all go home? That’s what I can’t understand.”

“Percy,
can
you
believe it? I mean, I remember him coming in and standing against this table—”

“Oh, don’t—Percy, what became of
them
? Where did they go? Those devils!”

“Oh, got right away.”

“Didn’t anyone hear anything, any firing? I mean, didn’t it make a noise? … Couldn’t they be tortured—why should they just be hanged or shot? Oh, I 
do think, I mean I do think when you think—”

“Well, we’ve got to get ‘em, haven’t we? Look, just try—”

“Oh, I can’t, I tell you— Why can’t we all go home?”

“Percy, leave her
alone
! O God, my head; I shall cut my hair off. I mean, he came in and stood there against that table. Why did they get just Gerald?—-Oh, yes, I know there was the sergeant—but
he
won’t die; I know he won’t die … I can’t believe it. Percy,
can
you believe it? Percy, say something!”

Betty sobbed: “I should like to— Oh, I should like to— Those beasts, those beasts.”

“Look, you two girls go to bed.”

“Oh, how can we!”

“Oh, why isn’t Timmy here! I mean, when I think of Timmy, and out all night—I can’t understand the King, I can’t understand the Government: I think it’s awful.”

But they went to bed—Percy spent the night on two chairs—and lay in what seemed to both an unnatural contiguity, reclasping each other’s fingers, talking of “him,” of “you know who” and “that boy” in the eager voices, low-pitched and breaking, kept as a rule to discuss the intimacies of their marriages. In the same moment they fell, dimly shocked at each other, asleep. Then Denise saw Lois clearly, standing affectedly on the Danielstown steps with a tin of biscuits, a room full of mirrors behind her. And Betty woke with surprise to hear herself say: “What I mean is, it seems so odd that he shouldn’t really have meant anything.”

They heard an early bugle shivering in the rain.

MR. DAVENTRY arrived before the postman. He had not paid an unofficial visit since he had been in Ireland; it seemed to him odd there should be nothing to search for, nobody to interrogate. It was early, wet tarnished branches came cheerfully through the mist. He had come to the gate with a convoy on its way over to Ballyhinch; two lorries had ground into silence and waited for him at the gate, alarming the cottagers. He walked up the avenue lightly and rapidly: nothing, at the stage things had reached for him, mattered. And superciliously he returned the stare of the house.

He rang and made his demand. Lois came out slowly, dumb with all she must begin to say—for who could an anxious waiting officer be but Gerald? “Really …” Lady Naylor had remarked, with a glance at the clock, advising her to put down her table napkin. And Francie, smiling, had covered up her egg for her.

“You?” she now said, while everything, the importance of everything, faintly altered. “Come and have breakfast.”

He told her that there had been a catastrophe yesterday, west of Clonmore: a patrol with an officer and an N.C.O. had been ambushed, fired on at a crossroads. The officer—Lesworth—was instantly killed, the N.C.O. shot in the stomach. The enemy made off across country, they did not care for sustained fire, in in spite of the hedges. The men did what they could for the sergeant.

“Will he die?”

“Probably.”

“And Gerald was killed.”

“Yes. Would you—?”

“I’m all right, thank you.”

“Right you are.” He turned round and stood with his back to her. She asked what time it had happened; he said about six o’clock. She thought how accurate Gerald was and how anxious, last time, he had been to establish just
when
she had been happy because of him, on what day, for how long. “They’d been out all the afternoon?” They both saw the amazed white road and dust, displaced by the fall, slowly settling. “As a matter of fact,” said Daventry, “we are mostly ready for things. I don’t suppose—if he knew at all—it mattered.” “No, I don’t suppose, to oneself, it ever would matter much.” But she thought of Gerald in the surprise of death. He gave himself up to surprise with
peculiar candour.

“Thank you for coming.”

“I was passing this way anyhow.”

“But still, there was no reason why you should take the trouble.”

Daventry glanced at her, then at the gravel under his feet, without speculation. Cold and ironical, he was a stay; he was not expecting anything of her. He finally said: “It seemed practical. Would you like me 
to—shall I just let the others know?” She nodded, wondering where to go, how long to stay there, how to come back. Her mind flooded with trivialities. She wondered who would go up to the tennis this afternoon, if there would be anyone left who did not know, who would expect him; she wondered what would become of the jazz band. She saw that for days ahead she must not deny humanity, she would have no privacy. “As a matter of fact, they are expecting me back to breakfast.”

But at the thought of Francie’s tender and proud smile, covering up her egg, she was enlightened and steadied by grief, as at the touch of finger-tips. She went into the house and up to the top to find what was waiting. Life, seen whole for a moment, was one act of apprehension, the apprehension of death. Daventry, staring after her in memory—she was, after all, a woman—went into the hall. Here, it pleased him to think of Gerald socially circumspect under the portraits.

He waited. The dining-room door swung open on a continued argument; they came out one by one, each, on the threshold, balanced a moment like a ball on a fountain by the shock of seeing him there. “Lady Naylor?” he said to Francie. “Oh,
no
—” She seemed appalled at the supposition. “Isn’t … Mr. Lesworth here?” “Not today.” Lady Naylor came last and stared hardest: really, the Army seemed to be inexhaustible. “Oh no—” she said quickly, as though to prevent something. He told her the circumstances. “Oh—
no
,” she repeated, and turned in appeal to her husband. “That is … that is too bad,” said Sir Richard and in despairing confusion touched her shoulder. He looked back into the dining-room at the chairs and plates and table, incredible in their survival.

The fact was, they did not at all care for the look of Mr. Daventry. They felt instinctively that he had come here to search the house. Lady Naylor, still statuesque from the shock, made, even, a little disdainful gesture, a kind of: “Here’s everything.” He, unconscious of her impression of being brought to book, remained staring darkly and piercingly past her. Behind her, across the dark dining-room, he saw through a window the lawn striped with mist and sunshine. In Clonmore it had rained that morning: they seemed to have escaped that too. She said sharply: “Where’s Lois?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know,” he replied, indifferent.

“She—you have—?”

“Oh yes.”

Her defence dropped; she said with heart-broken eyes on his face: “You know, we knew him so well. He came out here so often to tennis. It seems queer that one can’t—that one never— He was so—”

“Yes, he was, wasn’t he?”

“His mother, he used to tell me about his mother. Who will write? I should like to write to her. Yes, I want very much to write to her. I think she might like —we did know him so well, you see—Richard, don’t you think I—?”

But Sir Richard had slipped away quietly; he was an old man, really, outside all this, and did not know what to do. He was wondering also, about the Connors. Peter Connor’s friends: they knew everything, they were persistent: it did not do to imagine… .

Mr. Daventry said that was all, he thought; he must go now. He took leave with unfriendly courtesy and went off abruptly, with an air that obliterated them, as though he had never been into their house at all. Then she exclaimed, recollecting herself: “He must be 
unhappy; I ought to have said something.” There was so much to do now, more than would fit into a morning; she had some idea of postponing lunch. And hearing the postman, she half thought, terrified by a sense of exposure: “Suppose there should be a—suppose he should have—”

But there was no letter for Lois from Gerald.

No one was on the steps to hear the news from the postman; he went away disappointed. Lady Naylor thought firmly: “Now I must go and find Lois.” But she did not go; things seemed to delay her. She looked into the drawing-room to see whether something—she wasn’t certain what—was there. Francie, red-eyed, looked guilty over the back of the sofa. They did not say anything. The room became so sharply painful that Lady Naylor almost exclaimed: “Lois has not done the flowers!”

It was Laurence who, walking about the grounds unguardedly, was exposed to what they all dreaded. He came on Lois, standing beside a holly tree. She could have moved away, but seemed not so much rooted as indifferent.

“It’s all right,” she explained, and added: “I’m just thinking.”

His look became almost personal, as though he had recognised her. He said: “I think I should. I expect— I don’t know—one probably gets past things.”

“But look here, there are things that one can’t—” (She meant: He loved me, he believed in the British Empire.) “At least, I don’t want to.”

“Perhaps you are right,” he admitted, studying, with an effort of sight and of comprehension, some unfamiliar landscape.

“Well, don’t stop, Laurence. You’re going somewhere, aren’t you?”

“Nowhere particular. Not if you—”

“No, I don’t specially. Though if it has to be anyone, you.”

Taking this for what it was worth, he went on; brushing awkwardly past her against the laurels.

A fortnight later, Mrs. Trent drove over, the very evening of her return from the North. She had been inexpressibly bored up there and wished to complain. Lady Naylor, delighted, came out to meet her; it was like old times again.

“The house feels empty. They’ve gone, you know.”

“Yes, dear me. I was sorry not to have seen the last of Hugo and poor little Francie. What about their bungalow?”

“Oh, that was just an idea; they are quite off it. Bungalows inland seem so pointless, cliffs are so windy and one cannot live on a flat coast. No, they think now of going to Madeira.”

“Then they won’t unstore the furniture?”

“I don’t think so; they never cared for it much.”

“It’s a pity he never did go to Canada.” Mrs. Trent looked round at the pleasant fields and lawns, the trees massive and tarnished, the windows that from their now settled emptiness seemed to have gained composure. Her sense of home-coming extended even to Danielstown. She went on: “How’s Richard? And listen: are you getting in your apples?—we haven’t begun. They never seem to do anything while I’m away. And tell me; how’s Lois?”

“Oh, gone, you know.”

“Gone?
Oh, the school of art!”

“Oh, no,” said Lady Naylor, surprised. “Tours. For her French, you know. And to such an interesting, cultivated family; she is really fortunate. I never have 
been happy about her French. As I said to her, there will be plenty of time for Italian.”

“Oh, that’s splendid,” Mrs. Trent said vaguely but warmly. “Then of course you must feel quiet. She and Laurence travel over together?”

“She seemed so offended at being thought incompetent and he was worried at the idea of looking after her luggage, so we sent them over separately; he crossed Wednesday, she Friday. Both nights, I hear, it was rough … Yes, it’s been sad here, lately; we’ve been so much shocked and distressed about that unfortunate young Lesworth. I think I felt it particularly; he had been out here so much and seemed so glad to talk, and had come, in a way, to depend on one. Though it was a shock, too, for Lois. You see they had really played tennis so often and were beginning to be quite friends. She did not take it as hard as I feared, girls of her generation seem less sensitive, really … I don’t know, perhaps that is all for the best. And of course she has so many interests. But it was terrible, wasn’t it? I still think: how terrible— But he did have a happy life. I wrote that to his mother; I said, it must always be some consolation to think how happy his life had been. He quite beamed, really; he was the life and soul of everything. And she wrote back—-I did not think tactfully, but of course she would be distressed —that it was
her
first consolation to think he died in so noble a cause.”

Mrs. Trent had for a moment an uneasy, exposed look. She said: “It was heroic,” and glanced down awkwardly at her gloves. She missed a dog, she felt unstayed, there was no dog.

“Heroic,” said Lady Naylor, and scanned the skies with eager big-pupilled eyes that reflected the calm light. “Although,” she added, half in surprise, “he could not help it. But come in now and tell Richard about the North, he will be amused, though sorry that you were dull. To tell you the truth, we both rather feared you might be. Ah, don’t mind the time, I’m sure it’s early; come in, come in!”