The Lily Hand and Other Stories (14 page)

‘Is Creed downstairs already?'

‘Yes. Do you want him to come up?'

‘Not just yet, he'll keep. I have to see him, though, he wants me to go on east after the Festival, but I'm not sure yet if I want to.' She shook out her shining hair, and let it fall over her shoulders. ‘There'll be a box for you tonight, if you'd like to go. And an Austrian escort, a handsome one. No need for you to wonder who's going to keep you company while I'm engaged.'

Theodora's demure eyes took on a vigorous sparkle. She burst out: ‘All my clothes are so
schoolgirlish
! You know what Mummy is! Will you help me to choose a frock here? I
can't
wear my cottons to the opera, honestly. Wait till you see them!'

‘Cottons are in, you know. But if you don't like them, we'll fix something else for you.' She looked up suddenly, and saw how the dazzled blue eyes clung to the grey-and-gold dress upon its hanger, with open and resigned envy, without any hope or any malevolence at all. She thought: ‘So I still have something she thinks she would like!'

‘Try it on!' she said. ‘I've worn it just once, and it's simple enough to look right on you.'

‘Oh, no, Aunt Bar, honestly, I didn't mean—' But her ravished eyes widened and grew moist with desire.

‘I know you didn't, but I do. Go ahead, see if it fits.'

Theodora's belt flew, her slim arms crossed and swooped for the edges of her skirt and the cotton frock billowed to the carpet. The waves of gold and grey surged over her head. She shook herself, and the dress settled upon her as though she had grown it.

‘How do I look?' She knew very well how she looked, she was flushed and shining with incredulous delight.

‘The waist's large for you, but Morgan will soon put that right.' Barbara walked round her niece, critically touching the folds into place. ‘Yes, you'll look very well in it.' So that's what was wrong with it on me, she thought. It's twenty years too young, for all its sophistication.

‘I've never had a dress like this in my life! Are you sure you don't want to keep it? Oh, Aunt Bar, you are an angel to me!'

Morgan, called back into consultation over the fit of the shoulder, flew for pins and cotton, and began to spin Theodora before the mirror like a top. The delighted little face appeared and disappeared as she revolved obediently, dreaming of a gilded box for her gilded gown and a beautiful young man attendant at her elbow.

Barbara left them to their labours, and went down to talk to Creed, who had several engagements eastward waiting for her approval, and as many good reasons as his finger-ends why she should accept them. He was waiting for her in a retired corner of the lounge, already half-obscured by the steam of coffee and the smoke of cigarettes. They talked business with the amicable rudeness of two old friends who have outlived the necessity of stepping gently with each other.

‘Well, have you made up your mind to be sensible and go?'

‘No, not yet.'

‘All right, we won't argue about it today. But it seems folly not to make the most of your journey now you're here. You're in excellent voice. You've never been better than you were last night.'

It must be true, for Creed never flattered anyone; and where music was concerned, what he said was the law and the prophets.

‘Oh, and Eduard rang up for you. I took it because you were still asleep, and we didn't want to wake you. He can't come and play with your little girl – his mother's apparently having one of her imperial tantrums again, and he had to rush back to Vienna by the morning train. He was spouting apologies like a fountain. One would have thought he was the only personable young fellow in these parts. Who would you like me to call up in his place?'

She detached from her letters no more than a passing thought, like a shed leaf, to follow Eduard home to his mother's tedious bedside, and said, before she realized what name would inevitably come first to her lips: ‘Call Mark and ask him to stand in.'

As soon as it was said she wished it back. Yet she could have taken it back, without incurring even the raising of one of Creed's thick black eyebrows, and she did not. Never go back? There's always a reason, somewhere far back in the mind, for a wilful utterance like that; don't revoke it until you know why you said it in the first place. I wish I hadn't started it! she thought, trying to compress the panic and pain within the heart for fear it should break into speech. But she could have stopped it, then and there, and somehow she knew that she was not going to.

Creed moved to the telephone at the other end of the room, but in a moment she was at his side. ‘Let me! Poor boy, I make such shameless use of him, the least I can do is ask him myself.' She grudged every word of Mark's to another ear than her own.

‘Hullo, Mark? This is Barbara. Were you planning anything for this evening?'

Distant, the unmistakable voice said, rather indignantly: ‘I'm going to the opera, of course!' She ought to have known that he would be there to hear her, he was hurt that she had not taken it for granted.

‘Well, be a darling, and get rid of your ticket – unless, of course, you were going with someone else?'

‘Well, no, just alone. But—' Dismay was in his tone. He was afraid her commission was going to rob him of
Rosenkavalier
and yet he couldn't deny her anything she asked of him.

‘I'm scaring you for nothing,' she said remorsefully. ‘What I'd like you to do, if you will, is share my box with my niece, and be nice to her. She's eighteen, fresh from England and she's very sweet, so it won't be any hardship. Will you?'

‘Of course I will!' he said, relieved. ‘What's the drill for a brand-new ex-schoolgirl? Have I to dress?'

She thought of the fitting going on upstairs, and laughed. ‘You have indeed, my poor child! The full regalia! But if you've nothing on all day, why don't you come and fetch her now, this morning? Take her to the Cathedral, and the Glockenspiel and the Marionettes! Then you can judge for yourself whether she rates a white tie.'

‘If I come round in an hour, can I take you both to lunch?'

She drew back at that, imagining the ordeal of sitting cheek by cheek with that vernal freshness for an hour and more, while his honest eye analysed the difference between them. ‘No, but you may take Theodora and my blessing.'

‘All right, I'll settle for that,' he said cheerfully.

She went back upstairs, marvelling at her own madness, to select a dress from amongst Theodora's cottons, and see that she did nothing, in her ardour, to spoil the dewy loveliness of her face. Theodora was secretly relieved at the exchange of an Austrian for an English escort; to appreciate so much foreignness and newness, she needed one present link with home.

‘What's he like?' she wanted to know, shaking out her white net gloves from their packing folds and turning the nape of a neck as slim and urgent as a boy's, so that Barbara could fasten the back buttons of her dress.

The tongue which would gladly have told her all Mark's beauty and brilliance said instead: ‘He's a very nice boy, and a fine accompanist.'

‘How old is he? Is he nice-looking?'

‘Twenty-four. I don't know – I suppose he is, reasonably.'

She could feel Theodora resigning herself, after such faint sales talk, to receive a disappointing young man with a large intellectual forehead and no light conversation at all. She wondered why she was going to so much trouble to startle them into delight when they met.

When the moment came, and Morgan brought him up to the drawing room, and Theodora sprang involuntarily out of her chair, with astonished lips parted in a dazzled smile, Barbara wondered if the convulsion she felt was of triumph or agony. The only absolute satisfaction she had was in knowing that it was of her own making. Whatever was going to happen, she would have a hand in making it happen. If it killed her!

The back view of them as they went down the stairs held for her a pain which she thought must be almost like a lesser death. Mark was a good head taller than Theodora, as thin and bright as she was rounded and tender. They were talking already before they reached the first turn of the stairs. She closed the door quickly and went to the piano, in order not to hear what they were saying.

A floor below, they halted, hearing her voice raised in song. They looked at each other, half smiling, listening to the liquid Italian floating upon the air, the well of the stairs carrying it more clearly than she had realized, for what she was singing was not meant for them:

‘Quanto è bella giovinezza

Che si fugge tuttavia!

Chi vuol esser' lieto, sia;

Di doman non c'è certezza—'

‘What is it she's singing?' asked Theodora, looking up at Mark in absolute confidence that he would know.

‘It's a song of Lorenzo de' Medici's, from one of the masques. The setting's her own.' He looked down at her, and smiled, serenely blind to the implications of Lorenzo's lament in that adored mouth:

‘How beautiful is youth, how bright,

Constant in nothing but in flight!

Who would be merry, let him be,

Of tomorrow there's no certainty.'

Theodora, impressed by the prompt translation, let it ripple through her mind with a gentle, delicious melancholy, and emerged from under the waves of its pessimism like a duckling, her new young feathers unpenetrated. Youth meant nothing to her; she simply had it.

‘She's wonderful, isn't she?' she said impulsively.

Her quick glow passed to his cheeks as naturally as a reflection. ‘There's no one like her! She's been marvellous to me – she is to everybody!'

They went on, inextricably interwound in her praises, down the stairs and into the sunshine.

He did not bring her back until early evening, when it was already time to dress. Barbara had taken a light meal and was resting, but she roused herself to superintend the assumption of the grey-and-gold dress. Theodora emerged rosy and tender from her bath, and put on womanhood only with her finery, growing tall, regal and mysteriously grave as the dress billowed down to her feet. She had chattered volubly about Salzburg, but not about Mark. Mark was already, it seemed, someone not to be chattered about. One likes to have one's opinion endorsed, thought Barbara, turning in her heart the dual knife of pain and pleasure.

She left the hotel before Mark called for Theodora. In her dressing room she put on the voluminous filmy laces and silks of the Marschallin's morning toilette, and Morgan knotted up the great glistening fall of her hair into the artfully artless array of a great lady fresh from her bed. How many Marschallins, she thought, can play the part at forty without a wig? She hadn't a grey thread yet. Only in the full, clear flesh of her face, when she was tired, slight loosenings of middle age began to show. ‘I'll make them remember tonight,' she said to her reflection. ‘I'll make it unfashionable to be young. They shall never forget me!'

She stood up, her face completed, and shook out her lacy train shimmering round her feet before the long mirror. The flush of resolution on her cheeks might easily have been the flush of rising from the Princess's happy bed, the sparkle of her eyes was bright enough for both royalty and love, and the sadness of her mouth, remembering Mark, might well have been carrying the shadow of foreboding for Octavian's loss. I
am
the Marschallin! she thought, with a stab of something that seemed to her more like artistic triumph than private pain.

Her arms full of her skirts, she made her way down and through the wings. The stage, immaculate eighteenth-century, with its great draped bed and its enormous Venetian glass toilet-table, cast off hastily two or three last hangers-on and received her graciously into its spacious emptiness. Her Octavian came on composedly, in white wig and ruffled shirt and champagne-coloured silk breeches, a handsome, tall girl with a natural swagger and a pair of magnificent eyes. They disposed themselves calmly into the attitude of love, his cheek upon her knee, her hand blandly gentle upon his hair.

The curtain went up, the dark hushed cavity of the auditorium rushed in upon her consciousness, mysteriously peopled with its thousands of half-seen, intent faces, and the beneficent transformation which never failed took place in an instant. The almost unknown girl at her feet became the impossible beloved, whom she had and had not, whom she could not keep for ever, whose eyes she could not hope to fill for many years more with her waning beauty. Octavian was Mark, Mark was Octavian. The curls of the white wig under her fingers became the dark waves of his hair which she had never touched yet, the hands that held her were his hands.

She knew now what she had to do, and understood by what sure instinct she had already set it in train. What she could not keep with grace she must give with grace, as largely, as generously, as though it had really once been hers. The essential thing was to keep one's own greatness. The Marschallin had understood that. It was something to have been trained in the grandest of grand manners, to have sung herself into the personality of this high baroque lady, who knew how to maintain her impeccable style when her happiness went down into ruins.

At first she did not look towards the box where Theodora and Mark sat, but she was sensible of their nearness every moment; and in the middle of her great monologue she suddenly lifted her eyes and sought them out of the darkness. Two rapt faces, very close together, gazed down at her, great-eyed, and compassionate. Theodora in her new dress shone softly, lambent within her own freshness; the boy's normally composed and guarded face was wide open to the heart with admiration and sympathy. Barbara sent up to them what seemed to her all too clearly a cry of protest against the cruel pity of the young. She poured out to them the truth of herself, ‘
the old lady
, the Field-Marshal's old wife', finding it time to set free her little lover and remember her old age, and yet clinging with all her possessive heart to the boy's devotion. It was a joy to be telling them everything, openly, in front of thousands of witnesses, even if they would never understand. No, it was a joy
because
they would never understand, because she was safe for ever, in the armour of her art, from the indignity of being understood.