The Light Heart (48 page)

After a good deal of rambling talk about income tax and the cost of food nowadays, Mamma had finally consented to give her runaway daughter a minute allowance which wouldn’t have kept a schoolgirl: and Rosalind’s sister Evelyn, who was living in her little house in Surrey with her baby daughter while her husband was away in France, had his sister and his mother staying with her and made it quite plain that there was no room for Rosalind there. Rosalind had never drawn a cheque for herself before, and was enchanted with the privilege when Phoebe made it possible, and insisted that she could live for years on a hundred, pounds. But before she knew it she had spent ten of it on presents for everybody, and forty more for clothes, which she really had to have besides the things
Virginia
found she could easily spare, such as a fur-lined coat. Rosalind could even wear Virginia’s shoes, which was very fortunate as Virginia had such lots.

Meanwhile no word came from Conrad. He could have
reached her through neutral diplomatic channels if he had tried. “I expect I’m blotted out,” said Rosalind philosophically. “He won’t ever acknowledge my existence again, even to divorce me.”

That was just what Phoebe was afraid of, and she consulted Archie, who said that the English divorce laws being what they were, Rosalind could never get redress there.

“She worries that people will condemn her for leaving her child, even though Conrad has become impossible,” Phoebe explained. “She thinks people may not realize that Victor has been sent away to school to fit him to become an officer—and to learn to hate his English mother, no doubt! She hasn’t been allowed to see him at all since the war began.”

“German boys never have much need of a mother, I fancy,” said Archie. “It’s not in the system.”

“But if Rosalind can’t get free of Conrad legally what about Charles after waiting all these years?”

“Would they marry now, d’you think, if she could?” Archie seemed doubtful.

“I don’t see why not. Charles has been a monument of
faithfulness
, and poor Rosalind does deserve a bit of cherishing at last. To say nothing of what Charles deserves!”

To which Archie said, “Oh, rather,” and the subject died.

Phoebe came face to face with her own responsibilities as a mother when Bracken arrived from France on Christmas Eve, muddy and gaunt, and with a growing reputation for graphic reporting, and found letters from Dinah awaiting him in accumulated mail. When he had read them and had a bath and a whisky and got into fresh clothes and had a good think meanwhile, he got Phoebe alone and asked her flatly what she intended to do about Jeff. Phoebe at once looked guilty and apologetic and began to explain that she was going home in the spring, and sometimes thought she ought to go sooner, but there was so much to do here, and she was just beginning to feel she was of some use—

Bracken interrupted.

“Suppose Jeff didn’t exist. Suppose you’d never had him. What would you do, stay on here indefinitely?”

“Well, yes—perhaps I would. As long as I was needed,
anyway
. I might even have got out to France to nurse. But—”

“Then suppose you give Jeff to Dinah and me. Go to France. Do
what you like. He’ll be safe.”

“G-give him—?”

“I mean let me adopt him legally and make him my heir, provide his schooling, bring him up as my own, train him to inherit the paper some day and run it as I took over from my father. He’d be fixed for life, with a good job to grow into, and you wouldn’t have to—worry.”

“But, Bracken, I can afford to send him to college and give him a start in whatever he wants to do.”

“Sure, I’m not saying you can’t. And if ever he wants a job that way, I’ll give it to him. But—Dinah is inclined to abase herself because we haven’t got a son, and Jeff would fill up that gap and I should think everyone would be better off. Don’t let that word adopt scare you. It’s a mere legal formality, to protect his rights in the estate. It wouldn’t make any difference between you and him—and he would always have a home with us, and Dinah to look after him when you aren’t there, and a father besides, if he’ll consider me as one.”

“I suppose he’d soon forget me entirely,” Phoebe said thoughtfully.

“My dear—forgive me, but he has already forgotten you.”

Phoebe looked at him quickly as though to deny it, and then away, her lips rather set.

“You must think I’m—pretty heartless,” she murmured.

“No,” he assured her evenly. “You weren’t in love with Miles. That was the heartless part.”

“I tried to be. I
meant
to be.”

“And you’ve tried to be a mother to Jeff, but trying isn’t enough, Phoebe. Dinah isn’t trying. Dinah has no choice. And she has become so wrapped up in the child that her one dread in life is the day you come to take him away. Let her be really
happy and able to look ahead for him and lay plans. Let her pretend he belongs to her. Anyway, it’s all in the family, isn’t it! And whatever you do now, you’ll never want him the way Dinah does. You’ll never have any idea what it will mean to her to give him up. And to me, incidentally.”

Phoebe gazed at him with troubled, honest eyes.

“I must be what they call an unnatural mother even to consider it,” she said.

“Then you do consider it,” he put in alertly.

“I don’t know, I—Bracken, since I came back to England it seems more and more as though I was never married to Miles at all! It’s all receded so far I feel as though Jeff is the result of some kind of hasty—
indiscretion,
instead of a respectable
marriage
! And letting you adopt him seems to make that worse, somehow. The servant girl’s mistake!”

Bracken grinned.

“You read too many novels,” he said. “Let us have Jeff, and I’ll get you to France with the Belgian Red Cross—right up into the base hospitals where you can hear the guns. The British won’t allow their nurses near the front, but the Belgians are not so fussy. As a nurse you can go places and see things that are barred to me as a correspondent. And if you keep a journal you will come out with a perfectly whopping story. All I ask is first publication rights, you can have the book to do as you like with.”

“How generous of you,” she remarked with affectionate irony, and pondered a moment, her eyes on the bleak winter hills beyond the window.

She knew that Bracken was offering her what was to him the most attractive proposition he could imagine. Bracken would perjure and steal and cheerfully risk his only neck for a good story. It would never occur to him that she didn’t herself desperately want to be where she could hear the guns, which she was sure would set her heart to knocking about in her chest again, or that the prospect of nursing men straight from the ambulances with undressed wounds only filled her with
dismay. She could do it, of course, if she had to. People got used to it. They even got used to having the wounds. And it was a thing worth doing, where she could be really useful. With Jeff provided for, she was quite free again to be useful where she could.

Free again. It is my curse to be free, she thought rebelliously, forgetting that she had never really liked being tied to Miles and Jeff. She had done all she could for Rosalind, who was fast regaining her old lightheartedness. There was nothing she could do for Oliver, who had never lost his. In London there was always the possibility, disturbing, distracting, secretly desired, of seeing him again now and then. Once they had simply run into each other quite by accident in Pall Mall and on a carefree impulse had had lunch together at Prince’s, and so far as they knew had not been seen by anyone who mattered. But they couldn’t go on doing that sort of thing, deeply satisfying and innocent as even that much of each other’s society was. Not unless they were prepared to find themselves in an open scandal of Maia’s making, and that would ruin Oliver at the War Office and be bad for Hermione….

She sighed.

“All right,” she told Bracken. “I might as well.”

“Good,” said Bracken, and his eyes were kind and
comprehending
. “There’s one thing about the guns,” he added consolingly. “They do take your mind off things.”

C
HARIES
was the last man to feel that he deserved anything from anyone, but he arrived at Farthingale on Christmas morning with his arms full of presents and determination in his soul. Everyone was most awfully glad to see him, and made the most terrific fuss of him, and he was put next to Rosalind at luncheon. Looking down at her face laughing up at him during the meal, he said approvingly, “You’re getting fatter,”
and instead of taking offence she replied that it was because she was so happy. “I feel—oh, years younger! I feel so—so
light!
” she cried, and made an embracing gesture of floating. He noticed that she seemed surprised, as though any woman who left her husband should be covered with remorse and shame for years.

Farthingale wasn’t a big house, and it was pretty full, but somehow between tea and dinner by a curious coincidence everybody was taken with a need to write letters or have a bath or a nap or a walk before dressing, until Charles and
Rosalind
were left quite alone in the library. She was knitting in a corner of the sofa by the fire, and said that as soon as she had turned the heel she must think about dressing. Charles strolled over and closed the door and she noticed as he came back towards her across the room that though his smooth
guardsman
’s carriage was forever spoilt by the limp, his back was as straight and his hips as narrow as when he had returned from South Africa fifteen years before.

“That leg of yours,” she remarked casually. “Is it all right now?”

“As right as it will ever be. I shan’t be able to hunt, you know.”

“We shan’t have any horses for years.”

“Looks that way, doesn’t it.”

“Will it go on
for
ever,
do you think?”

“No. But for another two years anyway.”

“The
boys
,” she said, knitting. “Boys like Gerald Campion and younger—oh, much younger, one keeps forgetting he’s all grown up. Virginia says he’s in love with Fabrice.”

“Oh? Let’s hope he outgrows that.”

Rosalind laughed her knowing, childlike chuckle.

“You’re all so hard on her,” she said. “But you must admit she’s pretty!”

“Is she?” Charles was standing on the hearthrug looking down at her. “I suppose I’m permanently blind to every woman but one.”

“That’s very sweet, Charles, but you must find some nice girl and have a family now, on account of the title.”

Charles made a sound, half laugh, half gasp, surprised, amused, a little horrified, and replied, “Oh, bother the title, Buffy can see to that, he comes next after me.”

“Buffy?”

“You remember my cousin Buffy, Uncle Aubrey’s son. He used to come to Cleeve for the holidays when we were kids.”

“Oh, that red-haired little beast I chased round the herb garden with a cricket bat and he slipped and cut his chin on the gravel and howled so loud they all thought I’d murdered him?”

“That’s Buffy! He wears the scar to this day, but I don’t think he howls when he’s hurt, he’s a major in a Hussar
regiment
now, and won all sorts of glory on the Northwest Frontier. He’s married the nice girl already, old Lord Bollard’s daughter, and they have two good-looking boys, who must come from their mother’s side. So the title is provided for, you couldn’t ask for better.”

“But isn’t Buffy rather an ass, all the same?” she objected.

“Well, yes, he is, rather. But not more than I am, d’you think?”

Rosalind looked up at him on the hearthrug quite seriously.

“I wonder if you have any idea how good it is to hear
somebody
say something like that again,” she sighed.

Charles, who wasn’t conscious of having said anything, moved to the other end of the sofa and sat down.

“Do you remember the last time you were here I tried to talk you out of going back to Germany at all, and you raised a lot of silly arguments about my reputation at the War Office and so on?”

“Yes, Charles.”

“Well, all that won’t wash now, you see, because I’ve left the War Office and the Army for good. I’ve closed up Cleeve for the duration and am living in the dower house with a housekeeper and a couple of maids. Do you remember the dower house?” he insisted gently.

“Very well.”

“Do you remember how in the small drawing-room two sofas face each other across the fire, and the tea-table was always at the end of the right-hand one, where Aunt Flora sat—and it was China tea in shallow flowered cups with gilt handles, and there was a tiered cake-stand called a curate, with cucumber sandwiches and Dundee cake and some kind of brittle molasses things with nuts in them—”

“And cream buns.”

“Yes, and the sunset came in the west window and made a sort of pink glow against the marble mantel and on your white dress—”

“Fancy your remembering that!”

“It looks just the same now,” he said. “Aunt Flora is gone. But you could be there, pouring out the tea—if you’d come,”

“But, Charles,—I—oh, it’s no good, my dear, he’ll never divorce me!”

“Well, suppose he doesn’t.”

“You mean—come anyway, as—as your—”

“As the only woman I’ve ever wanted.”

Rosalind sat motionless, staring down at the knitting lying in her lap. The room was so quiet they could hear the wind outside, and the small sounds of the wood fire. He waited patiently, his eyes on her averted face. And when the silence was no longer bearable as they were, she laid down the knitting between them with a quick, decisive gesture and rose, not looking at him, and he stood up too, remaining where he was while she walked away from him, her head down.

“No, we couldn’t do it,” she said at last, very low. “A thing like that is impossible for a man in your position, with your responsibilities. You must find someone else—someone who would be—respectable—”

“Rosalind, I want no other woman at my side but you.” His soft, slurred tones were a little more emphatic than usual. “Perhaps by the time I am gathered to my fathers still a bachelor you will believe that. But it would be much nicer for me in the meantime if you could take it in now.”