The Light Heart (14 page)

Archie was not posted where he had a good view of His Highness during the cakewalk that evening, but Charles and Oliver, leaning up against the wall at the side of the room, were. And they both saw him take out the immovable monocle
from his right eye, polish it on his white silk handkerchief, and replace it, to bestow renewed attention upon the two dancing figures on the little stage. It was an unconscious music-hall gesture which sent the angry blood into Oliver’s ears. At the same moment he felt Charles stir impatiently beside him and glanced round with an unspoken query.

“Swine,” said Charles under his breath, and Oliver’s smile was small and grim.

“Somebody’s got to ride him off, I’m afraid,” he murmured. “You aren’t going to leave it too late, are you?”

Charles accepted the implication that Rosalind was his property without any futile obtuseness, in the tacit
understanding
which always existed between him and Oliver.

“We’ve had false alarms before,” he replied in the same experienced murmur which barely moved their lips.

“But not so much smoke,” said Oliver.

“It’s not possible,” Charles reminded him. “She hasn’t a bean. His family would raise the most almighty row.”

“He has the look of getting what he wants,” said Oliver. “Watch out for him, that’s all.”

“Easy to say,” Charles objected, with a smothered sigh. “But what can I do when I come down to it? I never get a chance to talk to her without Mam
ma
breathing down our necks.”

“I’d do something all the same, if I were you, old boy. And pretty damn’ quick.”

So Archie had guessed wrong, and was to be cheated of his private gloat. Mrs. Norton-Leigh was sitting beside Prince Conrad, and after one dazed, near-hysterical moment when she recognized the capering hoyden in the striped trousers as her own child, she was quick to sense in the motionless figure at her side an alertness and a concentration so complete that it was perfectly safe to steal a glance at his face in the light which came from the stage. Just as she did so, he made that offensive gesture of wiping his monocle, and all her intuitions sprang to attention. His Highness was not displeased. He was most tremendously entertained!

Her eyes returned shrewdly to the stage. So far from
unsexing
Rosalind, the clothes she wore only accentuated her fragility and grace. She moved like a sprite, impudence
personified
, her white teeth gleaming in her wide, carmine smile. Her gallantry towards her flitting, coquetting partner buffooned all the male gallantry in the world. Her strutting triumph as the beruffled Phoebe obediently twirled and backed and filled to match her steps parodied masculine conquest from the beginning of time. It was all there, subtle, cruel, and hilarious—the thumbing of the female nose at masculine vanity, in her cocky, grinning, graceful, rampant coon.

Rosalind brought down the house, and such spontaneous applause had seldom been heard in jaded Mayfair. Prince Conrad was putting his white-gloved hands together as heartily as anybody.

“Charming,” he remarked audibly, and his monocle gleamed as he turned his head towards Rosalind’s mamma, smiling his indulgent appreciation. “Perfectly charming. I congratulate you on your—lenience of mind—to permit such a departure.”

Mrs. Norton-Leigh, who had not permitted it at all, beamed back at him knowingly.

“It is the American influence, I fear,” she said complacently. “One has to move with the times. One cannot, in this day and age, bring up one’s daughter to be a prude.”

Prince Conrad’s left eyebrow, the one not engaged by his monocle, rose judicially, and he said, “I have no doubt,
however
—and I should prefer to think—that your daughter’s innocence is proof against the lack of—ah—restraint which is becoming so fashionable in what calls itself the younger set.”

Mamma backtracked hastily. She prided herself on being able to read men, and she had long before now classified Prince Conrad as the kind who liked his women straight from the convent or else out of the music hall. The imitation
sophistication
which most girls attained in their first season would never attract him. He must not be allowed to think for a moment
that Rosalind made a habit of escapades like dancing in trousers, however much this one performance had enlivened his interest in her.

“I know every thought in my dear child’s head, Your
Highness
,” she assured him sentimentally. “As you must have noticed, she is rarely out of my sight, and I do not encourage—confidences between her and other girls of her age. I think I am safe to say that she has no ideas of anything beyond what I have chosen to give her.”

“I am sure,” said His Highness, nodding approval, and
having
been clever enough to pick up her cue, Mrs. Norton-Leigh for the first time acknowledged in her secret thoughts the most daring and far-fetched hope she had ever entertained—and allowed herself to contemplate the possibility of Rosalind as a princess, eventually a Serene Highness, married to a fortune not a dozen Englishmen of any rank could boast—one of the largest fortunes in Europe, everybody said. The Schloss at Heidersdorf was believed to have over three hundred rooms and as many servants; the estate was as large as an English county, and the Kaiser always came for the autumn shooting. There were also a palace in Berlin, a villa on the Riviera, and several small houses and shooting-boxes. And it wasn’t as though one had to overlook things with regard to the man, either, for Prince Conrad was young enough, magnificent to look at, and had delightful manners—of course one could not expect fidelity from that type, but Rosalind would learn, her mamma felt reasonably sure, that too much fidelity in a husband could be very tiresome….

It was from that night, Virginia always said direfully, looking back, trying to see where everything had started to go so wrong, it was from that very night, in the house in Hill Street, with the consent if not the connivance of Mamma, that Prince Conrad began his open, shameless, pitiless, but flattering pursuit of Rosalind Norton-Leigh.

O
LIVER
had returned from Yorkshire his usual smiling,
imperturbable
self, and there was less opportunity in London for Phoebe ever to see him anywhere but in a room full of other people. She confessed to herself meanwhile that he had become—the word was chosen in desperation—an obsession. It was difficult to attend to what someone else was saying to her if Oliver was in the room. The effort not to gaze at him with open adoration became a form of agony. She watched his hands, stealthily, as he lighted a cigarette or carried round the teacups in the drawing-room. She listened to him with her eyes fastened somewhere else. When she was alone she
daydreamed
of him shamelessly, recalling all the time they had had together, imagining other meetings in impossible, more untrammelled conditions.

She was in love—headlong, schoolgirlishly in love for the first time in her serious-minded life, and she sat back and saw herself indulging in it with surprise and a kind of admiration. She had never known, because of Miles and the sober,
undramatic
devotion she had always had for him, the exhilaration and despair, the giddy ups and downs of this new unbridled emotion. It made her feel young and irresponsible, and
altogether
like somebody else. One result was that she had developed a soft, confiding, sunny look she had never had before. She laughed more easily, her eyes were bright and kind and friendly to everyone. Loving Oliver had somehow made her love other people more too, and the world had become a dear, generous, revealing place with largesse at every turn of
the path.

Because she was still intrinsically self-contained and because she put up all the barricades she knew to guard herself and Oliver from discovery, the new, enriched Phoebe was not as visible to the eyes of observers as she might have been. They all thought how she had blossomed, and gave credit to the New York wardrobe and the broadening influence of travel and wider acquaintance, and they said what a good thing it had
been for her. And they all accepted as a matter of course the inevitable association with Oliver, for he came and went as one of the family and was always encouraged to do exactly as he liked because of being on sick leave and having such a horrid time with his back.

He and Phoebe had not been really alone together since those few minutes in the little belvedere during Winifred’s party. They had ridden in the mornings in Rotten Row, encountering a great many people they knew—Phoebe always looked forward to seeing Charles Laverham there, on the days he was not on King’s Guard Parade, wearing what she called his bewitching get-up and which was known in the Regulations as dress blue patrol—tight blue trousers with a red stripe and polished Wellington boots and spurs, a white cross-belt over his blue tunic, a blue pill-box cap with a chin-strap, and sword slung. Off duty in the evenings he always wore ordinary clothes, which they preferred not to call mufti, and Oliver being on leave never wore uniform at all. Curiosity aroused by Charles’s splendour, Phoebe made Oliver describe his own uniform—blue with a white plastron and facings, and a drooping white plume in the Lancer cap with the Polish-style Czapka top. She longed for a photograph, and dared not ask.

They had dined and gone to theatres, always in a party of four or more. They went to Hurlingham to see Charles play in an inter-regimental polo match, and that was another coaching trip arranged by Bracken.

One day in the midst of tea in Hill Street Oliver inquired rather too gently how Phoebe was getting along with the guidebook, and she looked up to find him leaning towards her, his face very near, his eyes laughing at her. Phoebe’s cheeks grew pink.

“You think I have got very lightminded,” she said defensively. “But Virginia says it’s no time to go sightseeing while the town is full of visitors, and that I had much better leave it till after the Coronation.”

“It becomes you to be lightminded, if that’s what it is,” he
said, so that anyone could have heard if they had cared to. “Own up, my dear, you’re a much happier person than you were when you first came to England.”

Phoebe gazed at him in amazement, for when she came to England she had been happy about Miles and now she was miserable about Oliver.

“Am I?” she said blankly.

“You’re living,” he said. “You’re waking up. You’re having fun. Your eyes and your hair and your teeth all shine with it.”

“Oh?” said Phoebe, and her lower lip came out. “Were my eyes and my hair and my teeth so awful before?”

Oliver laughed at her joyfully, and she found it difficult to believe that he was the same man whose arms had been so hard and his lips so urgent in the little temple by the river bank. A pang went through her. Had Oliver decided up in Yorkshire that Maia was the one, after all? Because if Oliver loved her, Phoebe, the way she loved him, and was going to have to live without her, he couldn’t be so
rollicking
about things, teasing her, making these personal remarks when people might
overhear
. The pang had lasted perhaps three seconds when Oliver said, still laughing, “You’re priceless! I don’t think I can bear it!”

“Bear what?” asked Phoebe stupidly, for if he could laugh like that—

“Bear to have you marry Miles,” he said, and she sent a panic-stricken glance around the room to find that the others were all absorbed in their own conversations and were taking no notice of what Oliver said to her. “It’s quite all right,” said Oliver, amused. “No one is listening, and my back is towards them, hadn’t you noticed? Yours isn’t, though, and you really must try not to blush like that, do you want to give us dead away?”

“You m-mustn’t—” Phoebe began, and buried her face in her teacup.

“I know I mustn’t.” He sighed gustily. “I was just suddenly taken with it. You get more fascinating every day, and I have to just grit my teeth and see it happen.”

Phoebe was genuinely interested in that, and looked up at him over the teacup.

“Why do I?” she demanded. “How?”

Smiling his closed, rather one-sided smile, he studied her upturned face, and she found she could not meet his eyes for long.

“Shall I tell you?” he wondered then.

“Please do!” Nobody had ever called her fascinating before.

“Promise not to throw that at me?” He pointed to the empty cup in her hand and she set it down on a little table at her elbow. “You’re in love,” said Oliver, his back to the room. “With me. It makes you very beautiful, and me very humble. We’re playing a dangerous game, my dear, but so far they haven’t caught us out, I can’t think why.”

“Oliver,” said Virginia from the tea-table, “bring Phoebe’s cup, do you want her to starve?”

Oliver rose at once and returned to her with the cup, and his own from the small table.

“We were planning to see some pictures,” he said easily. “Does anyone here want to go to the Tate with us tomorrow?”

“No,” said Virginia rudely, filling Phoebe’s cup. “It will be packed with Colonials and Americans, improving their minds. Wait till after the Coronation, and they’ll all have gone home.”

“And we shall all have gone back to the country,” Oliver reminded her. “I’m taking Phoebe to the Tate tomorrow. If nobody will go with us, we’ll go alone. She must see the Pre-Raphaelites.”

“Pictures make my feet hurt,” said Virginia. “And Mother has seen Pre-Raphaelites
ad
nauseum.
Take Phoebe to see them if she’s fool enough to go with you, and come back here for lunch.”

“Thank you, I will. By the way,” said Oliver, waiting at the tea-table for the replenished cups, “I heard from the Medical Board this morning. They won’t let me rejoin before October at the earliest, and meantime I’ve got to footle about with some kind of asinine treatments at Leamington or somewhere.”

“Oh, Oliver, how
sickening!
” Virginia paused to look up at him with the sugar-tongs in one hand and his cup in the other. “Does that mean you can’t come down to Gloucestershire?”

“Only for weekends, I’m afraid.”

“And will they make you drink those nasty waters?”