To the North (15 page)

“My dear Cecilia!” cried Emmeline, with a surprise that abashed Cecilia.

“Then you’d rather I didn’t?”

“It seems rather pointless,” said Emmeline mildly.

“You see,” said Cecilia, worried, “I don’t
love
Julian. It doesn’t come off, somehow. It does seem a pity—I could be so much in love.”

This Emmeline doubted. She was aware, with concern and affection, of the diligence with which Cecilia courted the passion, exposing her heart hopefully like a child who has hung out a box where birds will not nest. Romantic, ingenious, melancholic, Cecilia lent the whole force of her temperament to this expectation. Her ear eagerly pressed to the whorls of the shell, she heard something always, but not the sea.

What could be wrong? Not a sense or a faculty failed with her. It could not always be Henry: having come and gone he was generally present, but not like this. He may, indeed, have thought worse of her for this impotence. Her heart—for she tapped at it constantly—seemed in order. She had loved: she was honest and did not exalt the idea of fidelity—what has once happened, happens again. Here she was at a standstill, her plot only half spun out. Sometimes she asked herself if she had loved even Henry at all. Then, brushed past by the younger Cecilia—a girl’s glowing face for a moment seen in a crowd near her lover’s shoulder—Cecilia felt slighted and jealous. She had loved, but could not recapture the tune of her bridal days… . It could not always be Henry.

Emmeline knew it was not, still, Henry, but was his death. More shocked by this than she knew, a little dwarfed by the accident, Cecilia could not estimate now what she suffered then: the sombre memory went beyond her compass. Death gone, one rejects the ordeal instantly: grief, great in momentous passing, leaves one a little smaller. Obstinate in its refusal to suffer, the spirit puts up defences; the frightened heart repairs itself in small ways. Very few remain ennobled; one has to live how one can—it is meaner living, gaudy, necessitous, full of immediate pleasures like the lives of the poor.

When a great house has been destroyed by fire—left with walls bleached and ghastly and windows gaping with the cold sky—the master has not, perhaps, the heart or the money to rebuild. Trees that were its companions are cut down and the estate sold up to the speculator. Villas spring up in red rows, each a home for someone, enticing brave little shops, radiant picture palaces: perhaps a park is left round the lake, where couples go boating. Lovers’ lanes in asphalt replace the lonely green rides; the obelisk having no approaches is taken away. After dark—where once there was silence, a tree’s shadow drawn slowly across the grass by the moon, or no moon, an exhalation of darkness—rows of windows come out like lanterns in pink and orange; boxed in bright light hundreds of lives repeat their pattern; wireless picks up a tune from street to street. Shops stream light on the pavements, upon the commotion of late shopping; big buses swarm to the curb, small cars dart home to the garage, bicycling children flit through the birdless dark. Bright facades of cinemas reflect on to ingoing faces the expectation of pleasure: lovers laugh, gates click, doors swing, lights go on upstairs, couples lie down in honest beds. Life here is livable, kindly and sometimes gay; there is not a ghost of space or silence; the great house with its dominance and its radiation of avenues is forgotten. When spring is sweet in the air, snowdrops under the paling, when blue autumn blurs the trim streets’ perspective or the low sun in winter dazzles the windows gold—something touches the heart, someone, disturbed, pauses, hand on a villa gate. But not to ask: What was here?

With the quick fancy, the nerves and senses Cecilia could almost love. She enjoyed the repose of smallintimacies, susceptibility she could command, reflections of passion momentarily commanded her. With her, the gay little streets flourished, but, brave when her house fell, she could not regain some entirety of the spirit. Disability seems a hard reward for courage.

IT WAS NEARLY MIDSUMMER: behind a film of thin opal the sun rose early—not long, however, before Emmeline was awake. She woke with a start, as though someone had spoken, not a shred of night mist clung to her brain: the day began from the moment as though she had opened a book at the right page. Getting up, she looked into the garden where she and Cecilia had talked so late last night. Something moved in the plane tree: fearing this might be Benito—so small, so high up—Emmeline, for whom the tree was a blur, put on her spectacles. But it was the one-eared cat from next door, a noted
flaneur
in other gardens. Every leaf of the plane now appeared in delicate outline: last night while they talked it had darkened and towered, edgeless, into a burnished sky. The next-door cat leered at Emmeline, scrabbled further into the leaves, then calmly walked head first down the mottled tree-trunk. At the foot it swayed off like a leopard, one rippling curve of malignity. Silence: the peaceful twitter of some alighting sparrows. This clear film over the silence of gardens was lovely; the day like a magnolia seemed still to be sleeping in pale bud. Down in the Abbey Road, traffic was just beginning.

Pausing now and then to glance out of the window, Emmeline wrote to Markie:

“Dear Markie,—Thank you for the letter I found at the office, and for the copper electric kettle which came yesterday afternoon. It boils very well. It will be nice to have tea without smelling of gas.

“Yes, I thought about you on Sunday. I wondered what you were doing. I was in Sussex. I’m sorry you didn’t like the people you went to lunch with; why did you go? What you said in your letter makes me feel very happy. But you mustn’t think all that. I am quite ordinary. If I seem stupid sometimes when I am with you, or as though I were somewhere else, it is because nothing else has been like this.

“This morning looks beautifully early, I wish you were awake. It looks like a day slipped in between Monday and Tuesday, that has nothing to do with the week. I wish you were here. There is so much I should like to say that I seem to have nothing to say. Perhaps some day words will be different or there will be others. When you get this it will be Tuesday evening and what I see now will be gone.

“Cecilia asked how you were last night and was interested hearing about your flat. She said she wished she lived in Lower Sloane Street. Just now when I looked out there was a one-eared cat in our plane tree: it walked down. I did the office accounts yesterday and they came out. I think that is all my news.

“Emmeline.”

As Emmeline finished the letter she sighed, sorry to say good-bye to the moment and Markie: a little door shut between them as she stuck down the envelope. Pulling on her red leather slippers she crept downstairs, where she slipped a light overcoat over her pyjamas, unhasped the drawing-room window and went out. The foot of the garden was screened by summery poplars: next door they were still asleep behind drawn curtains. Here there were few flowers; their white irises over for the summer, that would be all till next year’s daffodils. The garden bloomed in monochrome, silvery variation of green; some sheeny flag-leaves, a bush of rosemary somebody had forgotten: here a leaf of ground ivy caught the light like a petal. Daisies pirated everywhere and the next-door clematis showered over their wall. Emmeline saw justice everywhere: they suffered their neighbour’s cat and enjoyed his clematis. Unashamed of their flowerless garden she stood, looking round, in the dew in her red slippers.

She heard the side gate click and thinking: “The milkman,” did not turn round. But it was Markie who crossed the grass and appeared beside her, pale and puffy in a dishevelled white tie.

She exclaimed: “But I thought I had locked the side gate!”

“You forgot,” said Markie, and looked at her oddly.

“But it can’t be seven o’clock!”

“As far as I’m concerned,” said Markie, “it’s still yesterday: I haven’t been to bed.”

She looked in surprise from his tie to his face. Sure enough in his eyes dull as ashes, his glance restless, aggressive and quick as though still in company, she found the stale lights of yesterday unextinguished. Behind his strained eyes she saw the passionless pressure of dissipation, the whole fumy void of a night which, like hell, had no clocks, in which no remission was to be hoped of the hours. He added: “I’ve been to a party.”

“Nice?”

“Just a party,” said Markie, shutting his eyes.

“Anyone there?” pursued Emmeline, interested.

“No one you’d know—at least I hope not.”

This aspiration of Markie’s touched Emmeline, but depressed her: she would have liked to have known his friends. On the subject of parties she had less prejudice than he thought. It was true, she had not cared for those parties where, when she was very young, they had been silly with syphons, spoiling one’s dress, and young girls did not know how much to drink. She did not care much for parties where everyone disappeared and everyone else looked mysterious, where people wept or were sick, or for those affectionate parties from which it was hard to come singly away. She had, however, spent many quietly pleasant evenings under adverse conditions… . Markie had a good head; if he had been very drunk he was not drunk now. Only, like spirits upon his breath, a rather dreary portentousness still hung about his manner. From his clothes, it appeared that the party must have begun grandly, though possibly it had transferred itself from place to place.

“But how did you get here?” she said.

“We got into a car to drive a man home to Hertfordshire; coming back we went round in loops, I don’t know who was driving: possibly no one. I saw the name of your road—though it seemed unlikely—I stopped the car and got out. Curiosity.”

The oddest preoccupation and curiosities pucker the weary mind that carries itself like a burden not to be put down. It was true, he had been to Oudenarde Road only once, and that not in daylight; its pilasters, steps and incline of gardens were strange to him. He said: “I didn’t expect to find you.” They had certainly surprised each other. Emmeline, just a shade anxiously, smiled.

“It’s a nice house, isn’t it?”

“Very,” said Markie.

“But shouldn’t you go back and get some sleep?”

“Good God, no; that would do me in!” Sleep, in fact, would be fatal: he was due at his chambers by ten, before that he wanted simply a bath and some coffee. He declared he was all right so long as he did not sleep. Besides, he was still feeling sociable— “Though I can’t be pretty,” he added.

He was not: it was certainly not vain of Markie, calling this morning. He laughed, but kept irritably turning his head as though the skin of his neck were too tight, and tweaking his crumpled tie. To get his tie like this, someone must have been holding him tight round the neck, perhaps in the car. It was not yesterday with his chin and jaw. Markie’s appearance, however, while rather absently noted, meant little to Emmeline, for whom it was as though some ragged and bulky cloud interposed a moment between herself and her fixed idea of him—and in that moment, even, the cloud’s edge brightened. She was touched, it was dear of him to have come: for, liking response so much, he could not have hoped very much of their sleeping windows. If he were pleased to see her she could not determine. Their garden was lively with callers this morning —who had been first? The tomcat.

Markie took in her overcoat, her hair in soft uncombed strands, bare ankles and red slippers dark with dew. He said: “Why do you wear your spectacles when you’re not dressed?” Knowing he liked her better without her spectacles, Emmeline took them off quickly and, blinking at him, explained that she had been looking for a cat. She suggested, “You could have coffee here.”

“Oh, can I? Very well—thanks.”

They went in through the drawing-room. Whatever Markie had come here hoping to see, he seemed now to observe nothing. The servants were just down: Emmeline went to the head of the kitchen stairs. “Coffee,” she said, “at once, please, and toast and things.”

Then she shut off the kitchen, with its buzz of discreet surprise. Markie, having implored Emmeline not to ask him about the party, now went on to tell her a good deal. His recollections were mostly vindictive; she gathered he thought all women better away from parties.

“But they’re supposed to look nice.”

“They don’t.” Still producing a stream of cold volubility he leant up against a table and knocked off some books which clattered about the parquet. This, with the sound of the tray being carried tinkling into the dining-room to the tune of an explanation from Emmeline, effectively woke Cecilia.

“What’s the matter?” she called. “Is it lunch time?”

“There’s Cecilia,” said Emmeline.

“Oh yes, how
is
Cecilia?”

Emmeline, slipper-heels going clop, clop, clop, ran up breathlessly to Cecilia’s door. “Give Cecilia my love,” called Markie. Cecilia, indignant, still webbed-up in dreams, rolled round to stare at Emmeline in the yellow dusk of drawn curtains, She “slept high” on a whole pile of frilly pillows, the telephone sentinel by her bed. “Emmeline, what is the matter?”

“It’s Markie,” said Emmeline, outlined against the daylight. “He’s just having breakfast.”

“Why? Is he staying here?”

Cecilia, confused, had a vague recollection of having said last night she might ask Markie to dinner; of this good disposition on her part he seemed to have taken rapid advantage.

“He’s been to a party.”

“That awful party next door?” Cecilia, who had been mortified by the sounds of the gold chair party (in fact some roads distant) far into the night, told herself this was exactly the sort of party Markie
would
go to. “There’s no bacon,” she added, reviewing the larder dreamily.

“I don’t think he feels like bacon; he just wants coffee. You don’t mind? He sends you his love,” said Emmeline anxiously.

“Thank him,” replied Cecilia. “But I must say I think we should all be better in bed.” Diving round on her pillows she resumed the repose of a goddess. Emmeline went downstairs again.

Markie’s coffee had come; he sat looking heavily at the tray with its pretty Chinese cups. The dining-room with its airy white curtains, roses and slender furniture made the plain fact of eating seem quite irrelevant: here Emmeline pondered over a grape-fruit among the cool reflections of morning, or Cecilia dissected the pretty emotions by candlelight. Markie looked out of place here. Emmeline brought out a comb from her pocket and did herself up vaguely, sitting down opposite Markie. “This feels like after a ball,” she said.