The Last September (8 page)

By now the upper court was in shadow, they all flickered against the dark screen of the trees like figures cut out of light green velvet. Below, where hot bands of light still blinded the players, there was a suggestion of strain and violence. Whenever she looked down, Mr. Montmorency seemed to be handing balls to his partner in silent anger. She guessed it must be himself who was playing badly so that while she could not resist looking down, she had to keep looking away from him just as fast.

“You were splendid,” said Captain Vermont when their set finished.

“Oh no, I wasn’t,” said Lois by reflex action, and wished all the other things to which she was always replying, “Oh no, I didn’t,” or “Oh no, I’m not,” were half as true. And she thought what a pity it was that Mr. Montmorency, instead of exerting himself so fruitlessly, had not been sitting there at the edge of the court to watch her.

She walked down the slope from the court with Gerald beside her. Conscious of many people’s attention she did not know if she seemed enviable or foolish. “I wish you wouldn’t keep looking so pleased the whole time,” she said to Gerald.

“Oh … but I am.”

“What at?”

“Well, I love coming over here. I think you have such awfully nice parties.”

“Oh, the party … But David enjoys them, and he hasn’t got the same expression as you have. In fact, he looks rather sick. What can be the matter?”

“Well, we all feel a little rotten about that barrack.”

“Don’t.
Do you know that while that was going on, eight miles off, I was cutting a dress out, a voile that I didn’t even need, and playing the gramophone? … How is it that in this country that ought to be full of such violent realness there seems nothing for me but clothes and what people say? I might as well be in some kind of cocoon.”

“But what could you have done? You, you—”

“I might at least have felt something!”

“But you do, you’ve got the most wonderful power of feeling.”

“But you never take in a word I say. You’re not interested when I tell you about myself.”

“You know I could listen all day to you talking.”

She thought: “As though you could make me talk all day!” To cover the thought she said earnestly:

“You think we don’t all understand your not being there in time and not doing anything afterwards? We’re not all such idiots. We know it’s most terribly difficult for you and that you must obey orders. It’s bad luck the orders are silly. It’s all this dreadful idea about self-control. When
we
do nothing it is out of politeness, but England is
so
moral, so
dreadfully
keen
on not losing her temper, or being for half a moment not a great deal more noble than anyone else. Can you wonder this country gets irritated? It’s as bad for it as being a woman. I never can see why women shouldn’t be hit, or should be saved from wrecks when everybody is complaining they’re so superfluous.”

“You don’t understand: it would be ghastly if those things went.”

“Why? I don’t see—and I am a woman.”

Which was, of course, exactly why it wasn’t to be expected or desired she should understand. He smiled, too happy to answer, and tore out a handful of leaves from the privet hedge. She had this one limitation, his darling Lois; she couldn’t look on her own eyes, had no idea what she was, resented almost his attention being so constantly fixed on something she wasn’t aware of. A fellow did not expect to be to a girl what a girl was to a fellow—this wasn’t modesty, specially, it was an affair of function—so that the girl must be excused for a possible failure in harmony, a sometimes discordant irreverence. When he said: “You will never know what you mean to me,” he made plain his belief in her perfectness as a woman. She wasn’t made to know, she was not fit for it. She was his integrity, of which he might speak to strangers but of which to her he would never speak.

He tore out another handful of leaves from the hedges and scattered them carefully on the grass. They both laughed.

She was thinking: “When next I write to Viola, can I describe him?” Viola flashed off her men in a phrase, with a sweep of her red quill pen. The red pen had leaned from the Chinese inkpot, against the window, like a thin flame, a leaning flamingo on that day’s sunny mist in the Westminster street. It remained a picture of their intercourse. They had said goodbye in December, a slight day, anxious between the enormous past and future. The parting was hardly real, they had barely kissed. They were impatient, nervous, waiting for the curtain to rise. They had just left school.

They had left school the day before. Yet the new life had been impatient for Viola, drawing her away from Lois in the taxi, appropriating her with certainty. She had stepped from their taxi toppling with school trunks with a kind of solemnity, as on to a carpet stretched for her festal approach from the kerb to the doors of her home. Next day, when they said goodbye, her hair was in place already, woven into her personality. Her pigtail had been the one loose end there was of her, an extension of her that had independence, a puppyish walloping thing with nerves of its own. Now the hair was woven in bright sleek circles over her ears, each strand round like an eel’s body. The effect completed her; Lois knew she had been missing or else discounting something all these years. Viola must have played at being a schoolgirl just as Lois would have to play at being a woman. Two expensive young men’s photographs had risen like suns on her mantelpiece; these young men had loved since last Easter holidays; their position was now regularised magically by the putting up of Viola’s hair. For only little commonalities, she declared, had affairs while still at school. And Lois, after that goodbye so distinct and distant, as at the little end of a telescope, had left her with the composed and knowing photographs and the red pen leaning against the sunshine. She had wondered, going out to a day of shopping and the night mail to be caught at Euston, whether life was to hold for her, too, a man’s passion; and if so, when. And she had bought a dozen pairs of silk stockings and the black georgette Aunt Myra said was “old.”

But a man’s passion was not at all the thing. My dear, too Dell-ish! Viola went to what she supposed one would call her first ball; in tulle she went, smoke blue, with a close gold leaf round the hair—not bright gold, dull gold. Various people had seemed intrigued, were in fact intrigued rather definitely. There was So-and-so, an absurd person (flash of the red pen), 
and the aloof, rather masklike So-and-so—who might intrigue Lois. But when it came to So-and-so (a most brilliant flash of the pen) Viola would admit to Lois she
was
affected. It really had been affecting. But enough of Viola. “Now, Lois darling, you must tell me about them all: I must know everybody.”

And there arose, recurrently, the difficulty in describing Gerald. Who else had been intrigued, Lois was not certain. How much was somebody intrigued when they wished to sit out in a car in the barrack square for four dances? Might not Viola consider sitting out in a car at all rather Dell-ish? When someone tried to kiss you with whiskyish breath, how much were they intrigued and how much was whisky? She thought a major proposed to her, though he seemed rather old, but he was so much confused and had such a mumbly moustache, she could not be certain. And later on at the Clonmore Club, a lady was pointed out to her as, she was almost certain, that major’s wife. David had seemed intrigued, but then he himself intrigued Livvy so very definitely and did not a young man under these conditions become slightly sordid? So Lois became so very general in her references that Viola was suspicious; she asked: was there really anyone? And began to write in a married-womanish tone of encouragement, which considering she could have been married at any moment was really justified. Lois was forced to state there
was
a man in the Rutlands, a Gerald Lesworth, whom she found affecting. She supposed there was no question as to his being intrigued; people seemed to notice. So Viola wrote back, she must hear all about him, should have heard before: her Lol was really the final Sphinx. She wanted to know, to see, to hear him, even to smell him—because all the nicest men did smell, didn’t they, indefinitely but divinely. One noticed it when one was dancing or, sometimes, sitting out. So now, please, everything: by return.

Viola did not like moustaches, but some men did qualify their moustaches, surely? Gerald’s lay like a fine dark shadow, so that his lip seemed to curl up more than it did. It answered his eyebrows somehow— that had a way of drawing together while he spoke— and some soft edgeless darkness about his eyes. If one mentioned his teeth so white that his smile seemed a long slow flash in the tanned face, didn’t it make him sound like Fairbanks? For he was
not
, at all. He had a way of looking down while he spoke as though his thoughts were under his eyelids. From his look she had sometimes turned in impatience, never in discomfort. There was emotion there unclothed in the demi-decency of thought; nakedness, not a suggestive
déshabillé.
If he was looking away and one spoke, his: eyes returned with an extraordinary look of welcome. He had a good chin, cut sharply away underneath with a strong shadow. His head was pleasant with bumps, that made planes of light and shadow over his polished hair. And she knew she liked something about the back of his neck: it was a personal neck—not just a connection, an isthmus—with skin fitting closely over the muscles.

As she stood
looking
at
Gerald
by
the
privet hedge,
he emerged from the mist of familiarity clear to her mental eye. She saw him as though for the first time, with a quick response to his beauty; she saw him as though he were dead, as though she had lost him, with the pang of an evocation. While she could hold him thus—before he receded or came too closely forward— she wanted to run indoors and write to Viola. Viola would be certain to tell her she loved him, and by that 
declaration, to be expressed with vigour, Lois was too certain to be affected. She was afraid at the thought of it.

She would have loved to love him; she felt some kind of wistfulness, some deprivation. If there could only be some change, some movement—in her, outside of her, somewhere between them—some incalculable shifting of perspectives that would bring him wholly into focus, mind and spirit, as he had been bodily in focus now—she could love him. Something must be transmuted … Or else, possibly, if he would not love her so, give her air to grow in, not stifle her imagination.

He said: “What’s the matter? Bothered?”

“Thinking—about you, in a kind of way.”

“Good.”

“I was describing you. How would you describe me?”

He was surprised, he needed time to think of this; he did not know. “I must just go in,” she said “—do you mind?—and write a letter. It’s so important. Will you post it for me at Clonmore?”

But meanwhile they had been irritating Lady Naylor, who seeing Lois stand so vaguely down by the privet hedge, disclaiming implicitly the party given for her amusement, was goaded to the point of an interruption. Now she called: “Lois—Lois!”

Lois sighed and went to her.

“I want you to take the Trents and Maguires and Boatleys round the garden,” she said as her niece approached. “I shall be coming later—” She murmured: “When some more of the people have gone… . Mrs. Trent wants a cutting of the allspice and would like to see if there’s anything else she would like. Tell Donovan.” She murmured again: “And don’t let

Mrs. Boatley get with Mrs. Maguire, she is a Christian Scientist and will talk of it, and you know the Maguires’ little nephew died of that. And if the Boatleys like the peaches give them some, let Donovan pack them.” She added in a still lower tone, of reproach: “Because I don’t believe there were raspberries for them at tea.”

FRANCIE 
was finding Laurence not so difficult after all, if one just ran on quite naturally. They sat at the top of the steps together, after everybody had gone. The fields looked wider, the sky more gracious and distant seen through the clearing smoke of social activity. The Trents left last but one, the Hartigans and their aunt Mrs. Foxe-O’Connor had just gone jogging away up the avenue knee to knee in their little trap. The gravel at the foot of the steps was all scored up and flung into spirals by the turning of wheels. Early tomorrow, there would be a busy sound of gardeners raking it smooth again. At present, there was the busy sound of rooks: it heightened Mrs. Montmorency’s and Laurence’s peaceful lassitude to reflect that rooks still had to talk, to flock and mix in intricate sociability. Men and women had, since seven o’clock, been released from this obligation.

There was nothing to say, they did not have to say anything: they exclaimed their thoughts casually, not answering one another’s, on the retreat towards silence. All the afternoon they had been asking questions and ignoring the answers as far as possible. 
Laurence knew he could not be asked by his aunt to bring the chairs in or see whether Lois had locked the garden while he sat here, so apparently entertaining Mrs. Montmorency.

Francie had not wanted to know how anyone was; health played too large a part in her life already. She had not wanted to know if they thought the garden was lovely—the supremacy of Danielstown garden made opinion irrelevant—whether they preferred winter to summer because of the hunting, or summer to winter because of the tennis. Neither had it seemed to Laurence important whether anyone wanted more tea or had had really enough, whether they feared to be driven into the ditch by Black and Tans on the way home, or whether they knew Oxford. They both felt themselves coming to life again slowly, now that the party was over, and putting off a sort of antagonism. At an upstairs window they could hear Lady Naylor and Lois discussing the guests and agreeing that it had been a successful day.