The Light and the Dark (43 page)

Roy’s marriage caused more stir than his other choice. The wedding took place in the autumn, three weeks before he sailed across to America for his flying training. I was held in London and could not attend it. One of the features of those years was the geographical constraint under which we had to live; a few years earlier, we had had more leisure than most people in the world; now I could not get out of my office even for the day of Roy’s wedding. In fact, I had only seen him for an hour or two since that night he made the special visit to tell me his news. We were all confined, as it were in prison. Many friends I had not seen since the beginning of the war.

But sitting in London, dining now and then with the Royces, I heard enough furore about the marriage. Lady Muriel was at first incredulous; then, contrary to all expectations, she became unusually indulgent. “I refuse to blame him,” she said. “I’ve seen other men make marriages almost as impossible as this before they went to fight. When a man goes off to fight, he feels a basic need to find a – squaw. I consider this young woman is simply his squaw. As for the future,” she said in a grand, gnomic fashion, “I prefer not to speak.”

Joan suffered afresh from all the different wounds of humiliated and unrequited love. She could feel her confidence and self-respect seeping away; she ached with the hunger of her fibres; she was lost in the depth of her heart. She had been able to adjust herself to loss before, while she could believe that he was weighted down with misery, that neither she nor any woman could reach or console him. But now he had married a stupid, scheming, ordinary woman, as though he were an ordinary domestic man!

Joan was not only hurt to the quick, but bitterly angry. And the anger was good for her. It burned away some of her self-distrust. Anything was better than that she should be frightened off love for good. She might feel that no man would ever truly love her; for her, that would be a mortal wound. But her formidable temper blazed out. I was glad to see it. I was glad to see her defiantly going from party to party on the arm of another man.

From two sources I heard that Ralph Udal had also taken it bitterly. Apparently Rosalind had not considered it necessary to break her engagement to him until she was simultaneously engaged to Roy. Had he suspected nothing? Was he so self-sufficient that he convinced himself all was well? I had not met Lady Boscastle since that final end-of-the-world week in Cambridge, but this was a subject peculiarly suited to her talents. She wrote me several feline, sub-acid letters about the “emotional misadventures of our unfortunate vicar”.

Udal was really unhappy. He showed it by one clear sign. He could not bear to stay in Boscastle where Rosalind had so often visited him, where – as even Lady Boscastle admitted – he must have known delight. He begged Arthur Brown to find him a living, any kind of living, “even one”, Arthur Brown reported over the telephone with a rotund wily chuckle, “even one with slightly less amenities.” Arthur Brown had exerted himself with his usual experienced kindliness; he managed to find Udal a slightly better living in Beccles.

Before Ralph Udal left the vicarage at Boscastle, Roy stayed with him for a weekend. It happened while Roy was on embarkation leave, and I did not see him afterwards. I would have given much to know what they said to each other; I was beginning to realise that Udal was a more singular man than I had at first detected. I guessed that they each felt a surge of their old friendship, unconstrained, warmer and more spontaneous than one could credit.

During the autumn, Rosalind came to see me. It was her first visit to London since Roy married her, and she was living in state at the Dorchester. As soon as she arrived in my flat, she busied herself tidying it up.

“I must find someone to look after you. It’s time you married again,” she scolded me. “I must say, it depresses me to think of you coming back here – and nothing ready for you.”

Then she sat down with a smile, knowing, self-important, triumphant.

“I’d better be careful,” she said. “It’s a bit of a drag for the first few months, so they tell me.” It was her way of telling me that she was pregnant. “We didn’t waste much time, did we?” Again she gave her mock-modest, humorous, surreptitious grin. “Of course, there wasn’t much time to waste. We only had three weeks, and that isn’t very long, is it?”

I laughed.

“It did mean we had to rush things rather,” said Rosalind. She gave an affectionate, earthy frown, and went on: “It’s all Roy’s fault. I’ve got no patience with him. I could kick him. The bloody old fool. If only he’d had the sense to marry me years ago, when I wanted to, we should have had a wonderful time. I ought to have dragged him to church by the scruff of his neck. Why didn’t he ask me then, the blasted fool? Our eldest child would be six now. That’s how it ought to be. You know, Lewis, I do wish I’d worked on him.”

She was serene, blissfully happy, but matter-of-fact in her triumph. I almost reminded her that she had no cause to reproach herself: she had done her damnedest. But well as I knew her, shameless and realistic as she was, I held my tongue. Curiously, it would have hurt her. She had the kind of realism that buried schemes as soon as they were no longer necessary. She would have stopped at nothing to marry Roy; but, having brought it off, she conveniently shelved all memory of plans, lies, stratagems, tears, pride abandoned. If she were confronted with it, she would look and feel ill-used.

She basked in her well-being.

“He is a nice old thing, though, isn’t he?” she said. “Do you know, Lewis, I enjoy looking at him when he’s reading. He has got a nice face. Don’t you think it’s lucky for a woman when she likes a man for something different” – she dropped her eyes – “and then finds she enjoys just looking at his face? I’ve never thought he was handsome – but it is a nice face.”

As the evening went on, I was unkind enough to remind her of Ralph Udal. She showed a faint, kind, sisterly desire that he should find a wife. As for herself, she would never have done, she said, contentedly. It was much better for him that she had broken it off: “in his own best interests,” I thought to myself, and made a note to tease Roy with it some time.

Her only worry was where to have the child. Roy would not have returned before it was born. His father was ill, and she could not (and for some reason was violently disinclined to) stay in the Calverts’ house. I suspected that she had not been well received; the Calverts knew her family, since her grandfather and Roy’s had started in the same factory. In any case, Rosalind was determined not to live near her home. After marrying Roy, she did not intend to spend any time at all in the provincial town. She had thrown up her job; her skill and reputation meant nothing to her, she was happy not to earn another penny. Roy would not be rich until his father died, but they were comfortably off. Rosalind meant to spread herself.

She would have liked to live in London; but though the nights were quiet then, the autumn of 1941, war-time London was not a good place to bear a child. And Rosalind said without any shame that she was a coward; she would come to London at the end of the war. Meanwhile, she hesitated. Suddenly she had her mind made up for her in an utterly unlooked-for manner. Lady Muriel took a hand.

Lady Muriel heard that Rosalind was with child; how I did not know, but I suspected that Rosalind had flaunted the news. She was kind and careless, but she liked revenge; the Royces used to snub her, Joan had taken away Roy for years, even in her triumph Rosalind was obscurely jealous of her. It was shameful to exult over her, but Rosalind was not likely to be deterred, when it was so sweet. I ought to have foreseen it, and have warned her not to gloat. But it seemed that she had had an hour of womanly triumph.

Anyway, Lady Muriel knew, and was strongly affected. Since her husband died, she had invested all the suppressed warmth of her heart in Roy. She felt responsible and possessive about anything of his. Most of all a child. His child must be cared for. Her feeling for her own babies had been outwardly gruff, in truth healthy and animal: and she was moved at the thought of one of Roy’s. It must be cared for.

Lady Muriel had no doubt forgotten that she once pronounced Rosalind barren. Here was Rosalind in the flesh, in the luxurious, triumphant, pregnant flesh. If Lady Muriel were to help with Roy’s child, she had to accept that “impossible young woman”.

Lady Muriel gave way. She was humbled by love. She did not see much of Rosalind; that was too bitter to stomach; she wrote her suggestions (which soon became orders) in letters which began “Dear Mrs Calvert”. Sometimes, I thought to myself, she behaved remarkably as though the child were illegitimate. It had to be cherished for the father’s sake – meanwhile one made as few concessions as possible to the sinful mother.

Yet it was a strange turn of the wheel. For like it or not, Lady Muriel had to become interested in Rosalind’s plans. Soon she became more than interested, she became the planner. For Lady Muriel decided that the baby should be born at Boscastle.

She would not listen to arguments against. Was there not plenty of room there? Would they not be reasonably waited on – despite her sister-in-law’s unworthy management? Was it not as safe, as far from the war, as anywhere in England? Did not the estate grow its own food, which was important nowadays? Could not Lady Muriel guarantee the competence of the family doctor?

But, of course, she wanted it for her own sake. It would give her a claim on the child.

Rosalind effaced herself. She was prepared to put up with insults, high-handedness, Lady Muriel’s habit of disregarding her, anything that came, if only this could happen. The idea entranced her. It was like a gorgeous, unexpected present. Like most realistic people, Rosalind was not above being a snob.

A correspondence took place between Lady Muriel and Lady Boscastle – firm, hortatory, morally righteous on Lady Muriel’s side, sarcastic and amused on Lady Boscastle’s. At first Lady Boscastle did not take the proposal seriously. Then she saw that it was being inexorably advanced. She objected. She was not a particular friend of Roy’s, she found Rosalind tiresome, she was bored by the war, she saw no reason why she should be inconvenienced; unlike Lady Muriel, she was not buoyed up by sheer vigour of the body, by the impulse of good crude health; Lady Boscastle often felt old, neglected, uninterested now, and she did not see why she should put herself out.

Lady Muriel quoted passages from her sister-in-law’s letters with burning indignation. Lady Boscastle, with cynical ingenuity, raised the question of the tenants’ peace of mind; they knew of Rosalind’s engagement to the late vicar; what would they be likely to think now? Usually, Lady Muriel was only too preoccupied with the tenants’ moral welfare; but she had not room for two concerns at once, and she brushed that point aside as though they were Tasmanian aborigines.

On paper, Lady Boscastle had the better of the argument; but, as usual when there was a difference about the family house, Lady Muriel had the greater staying-power, and harangued the others until she prevailed. Lord Boscastle appeared to turn into an ally; and in the end Lady Boscastle sent Rosalind an invitation. Lady Boscastle knew when she was beaten, and her letter was far more friendly than any Lady Muriel wrote to Rosalind (Lady Muriel still began “Dear Mrs Calvert”): Rosalind showed it to me with delight: I thought I could detect just one malicious flick, put in for the writer’s own benefit.

Rosalind accepted by return, and went to Boscastle in time for Christmas. In February, I had a letter myself from Lady Boscastle, in that fine, elegant, upright hand.

“This is really quite ridiculous,” she wrote. “God appears to have a misplaced sense of humour, which he reserves for those who haven’t taken him too seriously. There is no question, he scores in the end. Lewis, my dear boy, I once was pursued with singular pertinacity by a young gentleman of literary pretensions. He was remarkably, in fact embarrassingly faithful, and had a curious knack of turning up in unexpected places. I did not find him a particularly useful young man, but he added an element of interest by indulging in throaty prophecies about my future. He used to quote ‘
Quand tu seras bien vieille
’ in impassioned but distinctly imperfect French. He produced so many pictures of my old age that I was prepared for one of them to turn out right. (I should remark that he appeared to find them deeply moving: he was, as you would expect, a little too fervent for my taste.)

“But now I am
bien vieille
– pity me, for it is the only tragedy, as you will discover, my dear. Now I am
bien vieille
, and none of that young man’s absurd prognostications were anything like so undecorated as the truth. Really I did not expect this. It is a little much. I attribute it entirely to poor Muriel’s unappreciated virtue.

“Imagine me listening to the opinions, confessions, and simple aspirations of your friend Rosalind. It seems to me the most improbable occupation for my declining years. Except when I am immobilised and kept in bed (which, I have a feeling, will happen more often in the next few months), I do little else. Your friend Rosalind appears to think that I am a sympathetic listener. I have pointed out the opposite, but she laughs indulgently and feels it is just my little way.

“I have never been an admirer of my own sex. Listening to this young woman, I reflect on such interesting themes as why men are so obtuse as to be taken in. Feminine delicacy? Refinement? Frailty? Fineness of feeling? I reflect also on poor Muriel and poor Joan. I have to grant them certain estimable but slightly unlovable qualities: should one, under the eye of eternity, really prefer them to this companion of mine? To which of them does one give the prize for womanhood? I have never been a confidante of your Roy, but I admit I should like his answer to that question.

“I have met very few people, even very few women, who are as singularly unmoral as this young woman. I have known many whose interest in morality was slightly detached: but this one scarcely seems to have heard of such a subject. I must admit that I find it engaging when she assumes the same of me. It has not taken her long to regard herself and me as sisters.