The Light and the Dark (17 page)

“I have never heard of him,” Lady Muriel replied in dudgeon. Then, using the same technique, she turned on her sister-in-law: “Or is he some sort of lawyer? Would your father have known him, Helen?”

“I scarcely think so,” said Lady Boscastle.

“Don’t I remember one of your father’s cases having something to do with the name of Woolston?”

“Perhaps you do, Muriel,” said Lady Boscastle, smiling with charm and sarcasm. “In that case you remember more than I.”

A moment later, Lady Boscastle said to me: “It is such a beautiful sunset, Lewis. I should like to take a little walk in the garden. Will you come with me, my dear?”

She rang for her maid, who brought her coat and wraps and dressed her. She took my arm, leaned on me, and her stick tapped slowly along the terrace. It was a magnificent evening. The sun had already set behind the hills, but the sky above was a startling luminous green, which darkened to velvet blue and indigo, so dense that it seemed tangible, as one looked over the sea towards Italy. The lights of Mentone sparkled across the water, and the first stars had come out.

“Had I told you that my father was a barrister, Lewis?” said Lady Boscastle.

“No, never,” I said.

“It may have made me more interested in you, my dear boy,” she said.

She told me his name; he had been an eminent chancery lawyer, some of whose cases I had studied for my Bar examinations. It came as a complete surprise to me. Rather oddly – so it seemed to me later – I had never enquired about her history. Somehow I had just assumed that she was born in the Boscastle circle. She had acclimatised herself so completely, she was so much more fine-grained than they, so much more cultivated, so much more sophisticated. No one could be more exquisite and “travelled”; she told me of the sweetness of life which she and her friends had known, and, far more than Lord Boscastle or Lady Muriel, made me feel its graces; she had been famous in Edwardian society, she had been loved in the last days of the old world.

But she had not been born in that society. She had been born in a comfortable place, but not there. When I knew, I could understand how she and Lady Muriel scored off each other. For Lady Boscastle, detached as she was, was enough child of her world not to be able to dismiss Lady Muriel’s one advantage; she knew she was far cleverer than Lady Muriel, more attractive to men, more certain of herself; but still she remembered, with a slight sarcastic grimace, that Lady Muriel was a great aristocrat and she was born middle-class.

It might also explain, I thought, why sometimes she was more rigid than her husband. When, for example, it was a question of inviting Rosalind, and she spoke for the entire Boscastle clan, did the accident of her own birth make her less able to be lax?

We retraced our steps along the terrace, her stick tapping. The curtains had not been drawn, and we could see the whole party in the bright drawing-room. Rosalind was listening to Lord Boscastle with an expression of pathetic, worshipping wonder.

“That young woman,” said Lady Boscastle, “is having a succès fou. Lewis, have you a penchant for extremely stupid women?”

“I am not overfond of intellectual women,” I said. “But I like them to be intelligent.”

“That is very sensible,” Lady Boscastle approved.

“By the way,” I said, “Rosalind is far from stupid.”

“Perhaps you are right,” she said indifferently. “She is a little effusive for my taste. Perhaps I am not fair.” She added, with a hint of sarcastic pleasure: “I shall be surprised if she catches your friend Roy. In spite of the bush telegraph.”

“So shall I.”

She glanced into the drawing-room. She did not need her lorgnette, her long-sighted blue eyes could see a clear tableau of Roy, Joan, and Lady Muriel: Lady Muriel had turned away, as if to hide a smile, Joan was beginning her lusty, delightful laugh, Roy was sitting solemn-faced between them.

“I shall also be surprised,” said Lady Boscastle, “if my niece Joan ever succeeds in catching him.”

“She’s very young,” I said.

“Do you think she realises that she is getting excessively fond of him?” Lady Boscastle asked. “Which is why she quarrels with him at sight. Young women with advanced ideas and strong characters often seem quite remarkably obtuse.”

“Under it all,” I said, “she’s got great capacity for love.”

I felt Lady Boscastle shrug her shoulders as we slowly made our way.

“She will never capture anyone like your friend Roy,” she said coolly. “Our dear Joan is rather – unadorned.”

She began to laugh, and turned up her face in the brilliant twilight. She looked puckish, monkey-like, satirical, enchanting.

“I am sure that her mother will never notice that Joan is getting fond of him,” said Lady Boscastle. “Muriel has never been known to notice anything of the kind in her life. It was sometimes convenient that she didn’t, my dear Lewis. Perhaps it was as well.”

In the small hours of the next morning, I was having my usual game of baccarat. I heard Rosalind’s dying fall behind me.

“I thought I should find you here. Shall I join in?”

But she did not know the rules. Sooner than explain them, it was easier for me to take her across to a roulette table.

“Don’t tell Roy that I’ve been here,” she said. “Or else I shall get into trouble.”

She gambled with the utmost method. She had decided to invest exactly ten pounds. If she made it twenty, she would stop: if she lost it, she would also stop. She sat there, looking modish, plaintive, and open-eyed: in fact, I thought, if it came to a deal she was more than a match for the violet-powdered, predatory faces round her. That night the numbers ran against her, and in half-an-hour she had lost her quota.

“That’s that,” said Rosalind. “Please can I have a drink?”

She liked money, but she threw away sums which to her were not negligible. In presents, in loans, in inventing and paying for treats, she was the most generous of women. The ten pounds had gone, and she did not give it a thought.

We sat in two of the big armchairs by the bar.

“Where’s Roy?” I asked.

“In bed, of course. And fast asleep. He sleeps like a child, bless him.”

“Always?”

“Oh, I’ve known him have a bout of insomnia. You knew that, did you? It was rather a bad one. But as a rule he just goes to sleep as soon as his head touches the pillow.” She smiled. “He’s rather a dear old thing.”

She looked with clear open eyes into mine. “Lewis,” she said, “is there any reason why I shouldn’t do?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. Does he want more from a woman than I manage to give him? He seems to like me when we’re alone–” she gave her secret, prudish, reminiscent, amorous smile. “Is there anything more he wants?”

“You ought to know.”

“I don’t know,” she said, almost ill-temperedly. “I haven’t the faintest idea. I give him all the chances to speak I can think of, but he never takes them. He says nice things at the proper time, of course” – again she gave a smile – “but that is neither here nor there. He never tells me his plans. I never know where I am with him. He’s frightfully elusive. Sometimes I think I don’t matter to him a scrap.”

“You do, of course.”

“Do I? Are you sure?”

“You’ve given him some peace.”

“That’s not enough,” she said sharply. “I want something to take hold of. I want to be certain I mean something to him.”

She added: “Do you think he wants to marry me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think he ought to marry me?”

I hesitated, for a fraction of time. Very quickly Rosalind cried, not plaintively but with all her force: “Why shouldn’t I make him a passable wife?”

After that talk with Rosalind, I thought again that she was living with a stranger. She knew him with her hands and lips: she knew more than most young women about men in their dressing-gowns; yet she did not know, any more than his dinner partners that January in Monte Carlo, two things about him.

First, he was sometimes removed from her, removed from any human company, by an acute and paralysing fear. It was the fear that, unless he found his rest in time, he might be overcome by melancholy again. In the moment of grace when we walked by the Serpentine, that fear was far away – and so it was during most of the joyful holiday. But once or twice, as he talked, made love, and invented mischievous jokes, he felt what to another man would have been only an hour’s sadness or fatigue. Roy was at once gripped, forced to watch his own mood.

It was like someone who has had an attack of a disease; he feels what may be a first symptom, which another would not notice or would laugh away: he cannot ignore it, he can attend to nothing else, he can only think “
is it beginning again
?”

Sometimes Rosalind thought he was elusive: he was distant from her because he had to attend to something else – is it beginning again? Those occasions were very rare in the winter after his outburst. The period of near-grace, of almost perfect safety, lasted right through the weeks on the Mediterranean, the months of the Cambridge spring. Rosalind came often to Cambridge, and spent weekends in the flat in Connaught Street. She was pressing, persuading, bullying him into marrying her – with tears, pathos, storms, scenes of all kinds. But she did not know of those moments of fear.

She did not know also of his brilliant, insatiable hopes. Those he tried to tell her of; she listened indulgently, they were part of the meaningless discontent with which so many men fretted themselves. If she had been as lucky as Roy, if she had what he had, she would have been ineffably happy. God? If she had been born in a religious time, she would have enjoyed the ceremonies, she would have assumed that she believed in God. As it was, she disbelieved just as cheerfully. There was no gap in her life; it was full and it would always have been full; she was made for the bright and pagan world, and in her heart she would always have found it.

So she dismissed, tenderly, half-contemptuously, half-admiringly, all that she heard of Roy’s hopes. She thus failed to understand the second reason why he was “elusive”. For her, love was an engrossing occupation. She had not been chaste when she met Roy, she was physically tolerant, she could have loved many men with happiness; but, loving Roy, she could make do without any other human relation, either in love or outside it. She liked her friends in a good-natured casual way, she had a worldly-wise gossipy interest in those round her, she liked to talk clothes and scandal to her women confidantes, she liked to show off her knowledge of books and art to men – but, if Roy had suddenly taken her to the Pacific, she would have missed nothing that she left behind.

She could not begin to realise how profoundly different it was with him. He lived in others more than any man I knew. It was through others that he drew much of his passionate knowledge of life. It was through others, such as the Master and Ralph Udal, that he tried to find one way to belief in God. Into anything human he could project himself and learn and feel. In the stories people told him, he found not only kinship with them, but magic and a sense of the unseen.

By contrast, he often seemed curiously uninterested and insensitive about non-human things. Places meant little to him except for the human beings they contained, and nature almost nothing at all. It was like him to talk of the Boscastle finances as we drove that night along the beautiful coast. He had very little feeling for traditional Cambridge, though no one had as many friends in the living town. He was amused by my interest in the past of the college: “romantic”, he called it scornfully: even when I produced sharp, clear facts about people in the past, he was only faintly stirred; they were not real beside the people that he knew.

Because he lived so much in others, his affections had some of the warmth, strength, glamour and imagination of love. His friendship with me did not become important to either of us until we were both grown men, but the quality he brought to it transformed it: it was different from any other of my friendships, more brilliant than anything I expected when I was no longer very young. He made others feel the same. They were the strangest variety, those to whom he brought this radiance: Lady Muriel – the “little dancer” (who was a consumptive woman in Berlin) – Winslow, who soon looked for Roy to sit next to him in hall – Mrs Seymour – the Master. There were many others, in all sorts of places from Boscastle to the tenements of Berlin, and the number grew each year.

In nearly all those affections he gave himself without thinking twice, though his parodic interest went along with his love. He had no scrap of desire to alter or “improve” those he loved. He was delighted by Lady Boscastle’s determination to reform me, but he was himself quite devoid of any trace of reforming zeal.

There were only one or two in all his human relations where there seemed the friction and strain of self. He was fond of Ralph Udal, but he was never so utterly untroubled and unselfconscious with Udal as with ten or twenty people who mattered to him less, as with, say, Mrs Seymour or Lord Boscastle. It puzzled me for a long time until I saw that with Udal Roy for once wanted something for himself. He wanted to know how to find the peace of God.

There were others too, besides Udal, whom Roy marked down as having spiritual knowledge denied to him. He felt they could be of use to him; he tracked them down, got to know them; he had a sharp eye for anyone who could be of this special use, as sharp an eye as a man develops who is out to borrow money or on the make. They were always youngish men, as though he felt no old man’s experience could help him (he was deeply fond of the Master, he envied his religious faith, but it neither drew them closer nor came between them). Yet he was never easy with them. He gave each of them up, as soon as he felt sure they had not known his own experience. Udal was the only one for whom he had a strong personal feeling. Rosalind did not realise that, through Udal, through some of those others, Roy was living an intent and desperate search. She did realise, as she had shown with the Boscastles and with me, that Roy’s friends captured his imagination and that she must know them. That was all she could see; it was a move in her plan to marry him. His hopes, his sense of life through others, his search – they would go, he would cease to be elusive, once she had him safely in the marriage bed.