The Last September (5 page)

“I don’t think,” said Francie, “I remember anything so—so quiet as evenings here.”

“Trees,” said Laurence, shifting his pipe. His shirt front was high above them, he stood by the door with his foot on the scraper.

“This time tomorrow,” said Lady Naylor, “we shall want to be quiet—after the tennis party.” She let out a sigh that hung in the silence, like breath in cold air.

“Oh yes, the party! The tennis party… .”

“Francie, did I tell you who were coming?”

“You told her,” said Laurence. “I heard you.”

“It is the people who don’t play tennis who make it so tiring.”

Something about the way, the resigned way, Francie’s hands lay out on the rug, gave her the look of an invalid. “It is a good thing,” said Sir Richard, “You two never went out to Canada. I never liked the idea myself; I was very much against it at the time, if you remember.”

“I was divided about it myself,” said Hugo. “It seemed worth trying, and yet there was so much against it. I don’t know that I should have done very much good—I wonder.”

They wondered with him, with degrees of indifference. Lois stroked her dress—the feel of the stuff was like cobwebs, sticky and damp. There must be dew falling.

“Oh!” cried Francie.
“Listen!”

She had so given herself to the silence that the birth of sound, after which the others were still straining, had shocked her nerves like a blow. They looked, from the steps, over a bay of fields, between the plantations, that gave on an ocean of space. Far east, beyond the demesne, a motor, straining cautiously out of the 
silence. A grind, an anguish of sound as it took the hill.

“Patrols,” said Laurence.

Hugo reached out and pressed a hand on to Francie’s rug. “Patrols,” he told her, translating the information.

Sir Richard explained severely: “Out every night— not always in this direction.”

“They’re early; it’s half-past nine. Now I wonder… .”

The sound paused, for a moment a pale light showed up the sky in darkness. Then behind the screen of trees at the skyline demesne boundary, the sound moved shakily, stoopingly, like someone running and crouching behind a hedge. The jarring echoed down the spines of the listeners. They heard with a sense of complexity.

“A furtive lorry is a sinister thing.”

“Laurence, it isn’t furtive!” said Lady Naylor. “Can’t you be ordinary? If it wouldn’t be taken in some absurd kind of way as a demonstration, I should ask the poor fellows in to have coffee.”

“They’re careful enough,” said Hugo impatiently. It seemed that the lorry took pleasure in crawling with such a menace, so slowly along the boundary, making the scope of peace of this silly island, undermining solitude. In the still night sound had a breathlessness, as of intention.

“The roads are so rough,” said Lois; she could see the wary load lurching against the hedges. “I wonder now,” she added, “who is with the patrol tonight?”

“Someone you know?” cried Francie. But Sir Richard, who did not like his friends to be distracted from him by lorries any more than by introspection or headaches or the observation of nature, bore this down with one of his major chords:

“The lower tennis court, Hugo,”—waving sideways into the darkness— “is not what it used to be. Some cattle got on to it after the rain and destroyed it. It’s had rolling enough to level a mountain, but it won’t be the same for a long time. D’you remember the fours we had on that court that summer—wasn’t it nineteen-six—you and I and O’Donnell and poor John Trent?”

“I do. Now was it James O’Donnell or Peter that went to Ceylon?”

“That was a great summer; I never remember a summer like it. We had the hay in by the end of June.”

The lorry ground off east towards Ballyhinch; silence sifting down on its tracks like sand. Their world was clear of it, so that a pressure lightened. Once more they could have heard a leaf turn in the trees or a bird shifting along a branch. But they found it was now very dark. Francie shivered and Lady Naylor, rising formally, said she thought they should all go in. “Poor John Trent,” she added, gathering up her cushions, “never got over that trouble he had with the Sheehans over the Madder fishing. It went into court, you know, and of course he lost. We always told him to keep it out of court. He was very obstinate.”

“He was indeed,” said Sir Richard. “He made an enemy of Sheehan and it’s not a good thing to have made an enemy. Though of course he’s dead nowadays so it may not matter.”

“It may to the Archie Trents—Laurence, help Uncle Richard in with the long chair, and remember to bring in your own chair afterwards.”

“I never had a chair.”

“Oh, they haven’t lighted the lamp in the hall. That is too bad! I am lost without Sarah—do you remember Sarah, Francie? She died, you know.”

Lois, sitting still among rising, passing and vaguely searching figures, cried: “But it’s only just beginning! You’re missing the whole point. I shall walk up the avenue.”

Francie went in, groping; trailing her rug. The three men, carrying wicker chairs, converged at the door and the chairs jostled. They all put them down and apologised. Lois repeated: “I shall walk up the avenue.” But having arranged an order of precedence they all passed on into the house, creaking and bumping. She walked down the steps alone: she had wanted to be alone, but to be regretted.

“Mind you don’t get locked out!” her uncle shouted after her. The glass doors shut with a rattle.

Lois walked alone up the avenue, where she had danced with Gerald. She thought what a happy night that had been, and how foolish Mr. Montmorency now thought them. He had seemed annoyed at her being young when he wasn’t. She could not hope to explain that her youth seemed to her also rather theatrical and that she was only young in that way because grown-up people expected it. She had never refused a role. She could not forgo that intensification, that kindling of her personality at being considered very happy and reckless even if she were not. She could not hope to assure him she was not enjoying anything he had missed, that she was now unconvinced and anxious but intended to be quite certain, by the time she was his age, that she had once been happy. For to explain this—were explanation possible to so courteous, ironical and unfriendly a listener—would, she felt, be disloyal to herself, to Gerald, to an illusion both were called upon to maintain.

Just by the lime, on that dancing night, she had missed a step and sagged on his arm, which tightened. 
His hand slid up between her shoulders; then, as she steadied back to the rhythm, down again. They had set out laughing, noisy and conscious, but soon had to save their breath. Gerald’s cheek, within an inch of her own, was too near to see. All the way up, he had not missed a step; he was most dependable. And remembering how the family had gone into the house—so flatly, so unregrettingly slamming the glass doors, she felt that
that
was what she now wanted most: his eagerness and constancy. She felt, like a steady look from him, the perfectness of their being together.

“Oh, I do want you!”

But he was very musical, he conducted a jazz band they had at the barracks, and while reaching out in her thoughts she remembered the band would be practising’now. She was disappointed. To a line of tune the thought flung her, she danced on the avenue.

A shrubbery path was solid with darkness, she pressed down it. Laurels breathed coldly and close: on her bare arms the tips of the leaves were timid and dank, like tongues of dead animals. Her fear of the shrubberies tugged at its chain, fear behind reason, fear before her birth; fear like the earliest germ of her life that had stirred in Laura. She went forward eagerly, daring a snap of the chain, singing, with a hand to the thump of her heart: dramatic with terror. She thought of herself as forcing a pass. In her life— deprived as she saw it—there was no occasion for courage, which like an unused muscle slackened and slept.

High up a bird shrieked and stumbled down through the darkness, tearing the leaves. Silence healed, but kept a scar of horror. The shuttered-in drawing-room, the family sealed up in lamplight, secure and bright like flowers in a paper-weight, were desirable sharply, worth coming out to regain. Fear curled back in defeat from the carpet-border … Now, on the path: grey patches worse than the dark: they slipped up her dress knee-high. The laurels deserted her groping arm. She had come to the holly, where two paths crossed.

First, she did not hear footsteps, and as she began to notice the displaced darkness thought what she dreaded was coming, was there within her—she was indeed clairvoyant, exposed to horror, going to see a ghost. Then steps smooth on the smooth earth; branches slipping against a trench-coat. The trench-coat rustled across the path ahead to the swing of a steady walker. She stood by the holly immovable, blotted out in the black, and there passed within reach of her hand, with the rise and fall of a stride, some resolute profile powerful as a thought. In gratitude for its fleshliness she felt prompted to make some contact: not to be known of seemed like a doom of extinction.

“It’s a fine night,” she would have liked to observe; or, to engage his sympathies: “Up Dublin!” or even— since it was in her uncle’s demesne she was trembling and straining under a holly—boldly— “What do you want?”

It must be because of Ireland he was in such a hurry; down from the mountains, making a short cut through their demesne. Here was something else that she could not share. She could not conceive of her country emotionally: it was a way of living, abstract of several countrysides, or an oblique, frayed island moored at the north but with an air of being detached and drawn out west from the British coast.

Quite still, without even breathing, she let him go past in contemptuous unawareness. His intentness burnt on the dark an almost visible trail; he might have been a murderer, he seemed so inspired. The crowd of trees straining up from the passive disputed earth, each sucking up and exhaling the country’s essence— swallowed him finally. She thought: “Has he come for the guns?” A man in a trench-coat had gone on without seeing her: that was what it amounted to.

She ran back to tell, in excitement. Below, the house waited; vast on its west side, with thin yellow lines round the downstairs shutters. It had that excluded, irrelevant sad look outsides of houses do take on in the dark. Inside, they would all be drawing up closer to one another, tricked by the half-revelation of lamplight. “Compassed about,” thought Lois, “by so great a cloud of witnesses,”—chairs standing round dejectedly; upstairs, the confidently waiting beds; mirrors vacant and startling; books read and forgotten, contributing no more to life, dinner-table certain of its regular compulsion; the procession of elephants that throughout peaceful years had not broken file.

But as Lois went up the steps breathlessly her adventure began to diminish. It held ground for a moment as she saw the rug dropped in the hall by Mrs. Montmorency sprawl like a body across the polish. Then confidence disappeared in a waver of shadow among the furniture. Conceivably she had surprised life at a significant angle in the shrubbery. But it was impossible to speak of this. At a touch from Aunt Myra adventure became literary, to Uncle Richard it suggested an inconvenience; a glance from Mr. Montmorency or Laurence would make her encounter sterile.

But what seemed most probable was that they would not listen…She lighted her candle and went up to bed—uncivilly, without saying good night to anyone. Her Uncle Richard, she afterwards heard, was obliged to sit up till twelve o’clock. He had not been told she was in, so did not think it right to lock up the house.

GERALD 
walked across the lawn to the lower tennis court, swinging his racquet. Once he put up a hand and touched the back of his head, but with assurance: it was perfectly smooth and round. His flannels were gold-white in the sun; he almost shone. He smiled everywhere. It was nonsense for him to pretend he did not care for parties; he went everywhere, he liked to go out every day.

Everybody was sitting or standing about where the green slatted seats were, at the edge of the shade. No one was playing yet; there were two courts and eighteen players; they were discussing who was to play first, their voices sharp with renunciation. Lois was nowhere; Laurence sat on the ground smoking and taking no part in the argument. Lady Naylor talked eagerly to a number of guests who, holding up parasols very straight in the unusual sunshine and wearing an air of vague happiness, were waiting for play to begin before settling down to conversation. Livvy Thompson was organising: as Lois’s friend she felt this devolvent upon her in Lois’s absence: also, she liked organising. “You and you,” she said shrilly, stabbing the air within an inch of each player’s chest with a sharp forefinger, “and why not
you
and
you?”
But before she had even finished arranging the second four, the first would become involved again.

“Oh, Mr. Lesworth,” cried Lady Naylor, and waited for him to approach, “if you really are coming out, would you bring some more rugs for some more of the people to sit on?”

He turned and went back to the house. It seemed very odd about Lois—now where could she be?

Livvy Thompson looked after him anxiously. Had not Mr. Armstrong come also? During this temporary absence of her attention two fours arranged themselves and walked hurriedly out to take possession of the courts.

The hall, very dark after sunshine, was full of wraps and racquet presses; shoes had wandered away from each other under the chairs. The rest of Gerald’s party—they had all driven out from Clonmore in a hired motor—were still there, waiting for Mrs. Vermont. Captain Vermont and David Armstrong stood holding her things while she powdered her nose with difficulty before an antique mirror.