The Light Heart (10 page)

“Mine again at last,” Oliver murmured then, so close his breath was on her cheek. “I know I’ve been caught watching you, but I can’t help it and anyway everybody else is doing the same. You’re a great success, you know, are you enjoying it?”

“Oliver, let’s skip this one, I’ve been dancing steadily and—”

“By all means, let’s go outside where it’s cooler.” With his hand at her elbow they crossed the corner of the ballroom and passed through the French windows on to the terrace. “Even a full moon,” he remarked. “Amazing how Winifred arranges everything, isn’t it!”

“Oliver, please, I—want to sit down—”

“What’s the matter?” He looked down at her in the
moonlight
. “Something has upset you. Tell me.”

“I—your wound—” she stammered, and her fingers found his arm and held to it, briefly aware even now of the surprising hardness of the muscle beneath his sleeve. “I never thought—ought you to dance so much?”

“Who’s been talking to you? Clare? What a meddlesome girl she is! I’m perfectly all right, please don’t think twice about it.”

“You could
die
,”
she whispered, “and I wouldn’t even
know
—not till somebody like Virginia got round to write a letter—”

“I shan’t die of this one anyway,” he said cheerfully, “And I may never get another. They say our next station will be Delhi and that’s dull enough, God knows!”

They had reached the terrace steps, leaving the open window of the ballroom behind them. Only one other couple was in sight, strolling away from them on the gravel walk that ran towards the sunken garden. Phoebe hesitated on the top step, looking out blindly on the moon-drenched world, and he paused a little below her, waiting.

“No?” he queried, and his teeth gleamed in a smile. “I suppose you’re right not to trust me further.” He had been drinking Edward’s champagne. Not too much of it. But if he didn’t look ahead this was a very glorious evening, though his back was hurting like mischief and he suspected that he had pulled something loose in spite of the taping, and the doctors would not be pleased with him when he got back to them on Monday. He pointed away to the left, where the silver thread of the river showed. “That path leads to a little temple among the trees on the river bank,” he told her. “It’s sheltered on three sides, and if we walked down to it, which wouldn’t take much over five minutes there and back, I should kiss you—just once—and we’d neither of us ever forget it as long as we live. So you see how right you are to stop here.”

Phoebe’s eyes rested a moment on the path where it wound into the shadow of the trees. Then she moved deliberately down the steps like a sleepwalker and with Oliver at her side started towards the river bank.

The columns of the little marble gazebo glimmered white in darkness so dense under ancient beeches that there might have been no moon at all. When they reached it they were screened on all sides except the one towards the placid river on which a broad band of moonlight lay. Oliver set an arm around her waist to draw her further into its shelter and then caught her to him possessively so that his face was buried in her hair and hers was pressed into his coat, and her voice was a muffled wail he could hardly hear.

“Oliver, tell me how to bear it! I didn’t know it would be like this! How can you be so gay, how can you laugh and say silly things and fool them all the way you do! You’ve got to
help
me, you’re so much wiser than I am, you’ve got to
teach
me, before I can get along without you, you
promised
to teach me—”

“I didn’t promise anything of the kind,” he said quickly, and his arms were hard and urgent. “That’s not what I want to teach you, I’m no such smug, bloodless ass as that, what do you take me for?” His lips found hers….

“That’s more than once!” she gasped after a minute, and hid her face against him again.

“And you will never forget it is long as you live?”

“As long as I live.”

“You come half way,” he discovered with satisfaction. “You don’t withhold. It’s taken you the same way it has me. You’ve no choice either, have you! This is for ever. No, don’t answer. Don’t move. Don’t think. Not yet.”

And Phoebe, standing quietly in his embrace, her face hidden in his coat, was thinking without any astonishment, Here it is, for me—the laughter and the shamelessness and the
shine
—the confidence, each in the other, the reckless loss of time and space, the froth in the blood, the gay, giddy slide towards oblivion—what Gwen had, and Dinah, here it was for her, not with Miles—it would never happen to her with Miles….

“I love you,” said Oliver against her hair. “It’s time I said that, isn’t it! Ever since that first day at lunch, when you were so lost and so dignified. If I’d never seen you I would have lived a life of sober rectitude and never guessed what I was missing. If you’d never seen me you could have married your Miles and lived happily ever after—on a moderate scale. There is nothing moderate about this, my dear. I shall still love you—immoderately—when you’re ninety. I shall be ninety-eight then—years of discretion, for most people. Not for me, loving you.”

“Oliver, we m-mustn’t—”

“Don’t say it, I know all about that, say you love me, it’s more important. Well, hurry up,
say
it!
”
he commanded, crushing her, and she said it, laughing, to ease the painful pressure on her ribs. “You see, brute force does it every time,” he remarked, releasing her a little. “How would you like to be beaten every now and then, just to show which one of us is the master?”

“I’d love it,” she murmured, nestling, and felt his lips quick and hard and brief on her throat.

“Phoebe, you asked me not to argue, but it’s no good, darling—let’s throw in our hand, I’ll see it through if you will. Ah, what a
niggardly
thing to say! Phoebe, we shan’t ever have enough money, and we’ll have to live wherever the regiment takes me, but we’ll always have this! Will you face the music with me and then marry me, Phoebe?”

For a moment there was no answer, and he thought she was trembling, and found her shaken by silent sobbing, and her cheek was wet against his. Then she straightened slowly, fighting for control of herself, and sniffed like a wretched child.

“I must be the most awful trial to you, going all to pieces like this—could you lend me a handkerchief?—thank you. It must be the champagne, I’m not used to it. I promise not to snivel any more.” She dabbed at her eyes again, and returned the handkerchief to him. “I’m all right now,” she assured him bravely. “It’s a mistake to dance with you, I think. We must sit out the rest of them—somewhere in plain sight of
everybody
!”

“Have you said No?” he asked very quietly.

“Yes, Oliver, I’ve said No. Don’t let me even think of it again. It’s too demoralizing.”

“You’re quite sure this is the way you want it,” he said, while his hands lingered on her shoulders.

“You know it’s the only way there is,” she sighed, and started resolutely along the path which led back to the terrace and the ballroom.

But now he had kissed her, and she knew what it was like.
When the party finally ended, and she was safely shut up in her own room at Farthingale, she took off the white chiffon dress with the little pink roses, so much admired, which was destined to wind up like herself at Charlottesville with Miles—and panic set in. I can’t,
I
can’t,
said Phoebe, and threw herself down on the bed and pulled the eiderdown over her head and cried herself to sleep in the dawn.

T
HEY
found London covered with scaffolding like a town under siege—seats were building along the route of the
procession
, besides deal plank balconies and Venetian masts from which drapery and festoons were to be slung. Parliament Square was almost obliterated, and Whitehall was eclipsed with raw timber. Westminster Abbey had sprouted an Annex at the great West Door to provide space for the King to robe in. Archie reported that his club had been transformed into something that looked like an out-size poultry-hutch, and certain bilious members were complaining bitterly.

Bracken and Dinah got off for Spain, Winifred was absorbed in fittings and Court curtseys, Rosalind received with
characteristic
levity the news that she was commanded to the same State Ball that Charles and Edward and Winifred were to attend—she had been presented at a Drawing-room the year Clare came out—and Oliver was deposited, fuming, in hospital for observation, where he remained exactly three days and then turned up in Hill Street, announcing that he had got five tickets for them all to see the Boxing Horses at the Royal Aquarium show that night.

“What,” said Eden incredulously, “are Boxing Horses?”

“Horses that box,” said Oliver, and explained that Charlie (dun colour, fourteen hands) and Cigarette (black, with four white stockings, fourteen hands two) boxed three rounds with twenty ounce gloves, shaking hands and taking corners just
like prizefighters. Cigarette was said to use its left glove even more scientifically than some human boxers, and a natural antipathy lent realism. Their two-legged seconds wore evening dress, which gave the whole thing tone.

Everybody, including Eden, was enchanted at the idea, and they had a very lively evening, starting with dinner at Gatti’s and finishing off with champagne and rarebits back in Hill Street about midnight.

“Thank God it wasn’t my stomach that got hit!” said Oliver piously, filling his plate at the chafing-dish, and Archie heartily agreed that to
get shot in the appetite would be really too much of a good thing.

“Well, now that we’ve been intellectual and seen the Horses,” said Oliver, sitting down rather carefully though nobody caught him at it, “how about something really vulgar, like
Zaza?
Is Phoebe too young for
Zaza,
do you think?”

“Perhaps not, but I am,” Eden said decidedly, and they jeered at her till she gave in and consented to go, on condition that they would take her to see
Ben
Hur
the following night, and she wanted to sit in the stalls, please, and not in a box, because even the King had sat in the stalls for
Ben
Hur
as it was the best place from which to see the chariot races. She was enthusiastically promised stalls for
Ben
Hur,
and threatened with Ainley in
Paolo
and
Francesca
if she gagged at
Zaza,
and Oliver took his departure with everyone in the best of spirits.

But the day after
Ben
Hur
he went up to Yorkshire, and Phoebe was devastated by waves of what she identified with horror as plain old-fashioned jealousy, because now he was with Maia and she had no part in his days and no place in his thoughts. Before the end of the month Bracken and Dinah were back from Madrid, where they had attended the Royal bullfight, among other Coronation festivities, but Dinah wouldn’t look after the horses came in.

Meanwhile Miles’s letters arrived regularly, about once a week—painstaking, well-thought-out love letters, rather full of quotations and literary allusions, and always containing
some confident reference to their coming life together. Phoebe answered them scrupulously as they came, giving him
carefully
watered-down accounts of the luxurious, entertaining life she was living, practising just a little on her novel with
descriptions
of Rosalind, Charles the VC and the thronging, hearty, horsey life at the Hall, where a printed notice hung in the main entry:
You
are
requested
to
keep
the
hall
doors
shut,
on
account
of
the
animals
in
the
park.
And the spotted deer did come in, she explained, and had the maids screaming in corners like the Scottish Express—Oliver’s simile—until some big brave
footman
would arrive to usher the intruders outside. Doggedly Phoebe tried to include in each reply some intimate personal
paragraph
which said she loved him and missed him, and wished he could have come too—and that was out-and-out fiction.

There was no reason for Oliver to write to her from
Yorkshire
and he didn’t. But she found herself wondering what his letters would be like, and what sort of letters he was accustomed to write to Maia, and how an envelope addressed to herself in his handwriting would look—and she thought of a great many things she could have written to him of it had not been for Maia.

The official end of the war in South Africa was posted on June first, and there was rejoicing in the streets of London, though nothing like Mafeking Night at that, everybody said. They all went out in Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square with Bracken to see the fun and were thoroughly jostled and thoroughly enjoyed it. The fourth and last Court was said to have been greatly enlivened by the good news, and the big military review at Aldershot, which would be attended by the King and Queen, acquired a new significance.

Lady Shadwell, who was Eden’s dear friend and had
presented
Virginia at a Drawing-room five years before, gave a ball on the Friday night before Aldershot, which brought out many brilliant Diplomatic and Court personages, and a Royalty or two, and for which everyone had saved a new gown.
Rosalind
and her mamma were among the guests, and there would
be Eligibles present. Charles Laverham was invited, because Lady Shadwell had always been very fond of his father. And of course the household in Hill Street were going.

Bracken and Lady Shadwell were known to have had their heads together over the invitations, so there was no doubt that the German Embassy would be represented. Dinah sighed, because she had a constitutional aversion to Germans. But she was developing a
highly intuitive and diplomatic side which Bracken put to shameless use when he wanted something he couldn’t get by more stereotyped methods. “She looks so damned guileless and above-all-that-sort-of-thing,” he would say with pride. “And half the time she pumps them dry and brings me just the leakage I’m looking for!”