To the North (33 page)

“But I can’t help talking to people in trains.”

“In future I hope you may travel with Julian, or have more ties: no good has come of your running about alone— You are in a position to act: you must act, Cecilia. You owe this to Emmeline; it is the least you can do for Henry. I may say that if you
don’t
take this up, I intend to approach Julian. As your connection, Emmeline’s good name becomes his affair—”

“No, you mustn’t do that: he’d hate it!”

Lady Waters’ eyebrows went up, perhaps at this rapid new growth of family selfishness. “Very well: then listen to me. Either you must have this out with Emmeline, find how she stands with this young man and, with Julian’s view to support you,
strongly
discourage the whole affair; or else, invite Mr. Linkwater to your house, be as civil to him as you please but make him feel clearly that Emmeline has you and Julian behind her, and that her affairs are your own.”

“But they’re not: Emmeline would be furious: we could never say that!”

“And he had better meet Julian,” went on Lady Waters, ignoring the protest.

“They’ve met,” said Cecilia sulkily.

“Not on these terms. Mr. Linkwater’s relations with Emmeline must be recognised, or they must stop. If he is up to no good he’s not likely, on those terms, to trouble you long.”

“Yes, that’s all very well.”

“—It is all very well. If you are too idle and selfish to use your influence with Emmeline, who has every confidence in you—”

“But really, I can’t ask her
that
—”

“—And if you will not allow me to speak to Julian, I feel I have only,” said Lady Waters, clearing her throat again, “one course left.” She looked thoughtfully at Cecilia who, twisting her ring round in agitation, made no reply.

“My relations with Emmeline are more than delicate; she is not my own niece, I do not pretend to be in her confidence and I have no wish to force it. I may say,” added Lady Waters, “that the idea is repugnant to me. But she is Robert’s near relative, virtually his ward: he is devoted to Emmeline and I have seldom seen him so seriously disturbed. I cannot let this go on. If you refuse to do anything, I must approach Emmeline. I shall sift things out and go into the matter thoroughly: this affair of Devizes has really brought things to a head. I am sorry, Cecilia, but you are leaving me no alternative.”

“You mean, catechise Emmeline?”

“If that is what you call it.”

“No, no, no,” said Cecilia: her manner became hysterical. “No, don’t do that, Georgina: I’ll have a dinner.”

“A dinner?”

“A dinner.”

“Whom will you ask?”

“Poor dear Markie.”

Lady Waters, noting with grave satisfaction that she had destroyed Cecilia’s appetite so that the
soufflé
dwindled cold on her plate, cancelled the cheese course and led her back to the drawing-room, where she applied restoratives, praising her happy new bloom, asking about her trousseau and undertaking to find them a suitable house. Cecilia, talking with nervous rapidity, sipping her coffee, told Georgina much more than she had intended about her engagement to Julian: how when anyone else had proposed it seemed so much out of the question that she had never known how to begin to say no, and so seemed to waver; while to Julian she put up such reasoned and sound opposition that she had paused to consider, and been, considering, lost. Lady Waters, convinced that her niece had loved Julian at sight and had always intended to marry him, listened indulgently. When, at half-past three, Cecilia left to meet Julian her aunt kissed her once more on both cheeks.

“And mind,” she repeated, “you must not let anything worry you.”

When Emmeline asked that night: “And how was Georgina?” Cecilia said with a sigh: “Depressingly sane,” and added no more.

Emmeline noted the sign with dismay: she clung to Cecilia’s happiness. As in the mortal solitude of an illness someone turns for a moment to smile at a smiling face in the door, she looked forward all day to these evenings spent with Cecilia. Evenings together in the already rather distracted, doomed little house were becoming more frequent, for they had much to discuss and arrange. Julian was generous, friends from the outside world made fewer claims. Emmeline liked to be told little things, to be made to laugh, to enjoy through Cecilia the hundred happy banalities of an engagement. “What happened today?” she would ask every night, coming home. She was sorry Georgina had not been funny at lunch, or that Cecilia had not had the spirit to find her so.

On evenings when Cecilia went out with Julian, Emmeline walked the roads of St. John’s Wood or up to Hampstead, quickly, her hands in her pockets. Wet or fine, when rain drew the lamplight out into long reflections, or moths from the sycamores whirled in brown air round the lamps, she walked late; pulling up vaguely at corners or stopping to stare over garden walls. The neighbourhood appeared strange to her. Trees were dull with July; dust and lamplight made the pale houses monotone; she heard voices sharp with late summer fatigue.

She walked, too, by day, the streets of east Bloomsbury: quite often she found herself crowded out of the office. Miss Armitage was no longer funny: the partners, frightened and impotent, did not know where they were. Some contraction in Emmeline, Peter’s uneasy withdrawal had left a vacuum that this cold woman rushed in to fill. She held every inch and gained others: she undermined them. Emmeline, upon whom inefficacy was growing, found she had no longer the power to fill her own desk. She sat staring at bottles of coloured ink in the pigeon-holes, or turned over dully the letters put out for her to sign: once she signed something she had not read. This broken spring in her enterprise, this betrayal of everything could no longer appal her. Wrestling for life with something she found she had no hands.

“It’s absurd,” she said, meeting the panic in Peter’s eye, “we can sack her any day.”

“Why not?” But they knew that they never would. Everything passed through their secretary’s hands; she had tenacles everywhere; without her, these days, they did not know what they were trying to do.

“I’m sorry,” Emmeline said, “I lost Tripp for you.”

After just a perceptible pause he said: “Oh well, it couldn’t be helped.”

Emmeline thought she would come in one day to find that cold iron woman seated at her own desk. The old gay routine broke up; Miss Armitage made the tea; the partners were never alone. They became more regular, more efficient—but so were Cook’s, so were Lunn’s. Emmeline saw from the faces of clients how the whole character of the office changed. Coming in to project their holidays they missed that old radiant assurance, that sense of the whole world offered them smiling: holidays became just one thing more to be undertaken; this end of a gruelling summer. Cook’s were quicker, Dean and Dawson’s more central: just perceptibly, clients were falling away. The Serbs wrote from Paris that Miss Armitage had offended some of their clients. The graphs curled down from the walls and they pinned up time-tables. At five, at a quarter to, daily a little earlier, Emmeline with a murmured apology to Miss Armitage slipped from her desk, put her hat on and went out to walk the streets. Peter never looked up: cracking his finger joints, stooping and staring over the papers, Miss Armitage shoulder to shoulder, Peter worked heavily on.

“You should take a rest,” Miss Armitage said to Emmeline with her gaoler’s kindliness. “You look all to bits.”

“I can’t go just now.”

“Oh dear, yes, Miss Summers: we should get on perfectly.”

The pavements off Theobald’s Road are hot and narrow; you get jostled into the gutter or bumped on walls. All these years while Emmeline worked in her quiet office these streets, so noisy and near, had been going on: now she and they were acquainted. One day, scared by a sudden darkness over the sunshine, by an intensification of London’s roar in her brain, she turned into an empty teashop and sat down, pressing the palms of her hands to a marble table. She bought note-paper from the cashier and wrote, for the first time, to Markie. He did not answer. That week her hair went darker and dull, her face white: if anyone looked at her in the streets it was to wonder from what she was running away. Broken up like a puzzle the glittering summer lay scattered over her mind, cut into shapes of pain that had no other character. Walking the streets blindly she did not know that she thought, till a knuckle grazed on a wall, a shout as she stepped off into the traffic recalled her from depths whose darkness she had not measured. The bleeding knuckle, the angry face of a man shouting down from a lorry were like bright light flashed in her eyes: the nightmare drew back, waiting. One note held her ears through the hollow thunder of traffic: in shells of buildings the whirr of unanswered telephones. These were insistent: she put her hands to her head… . To please Cecilia, she looked at two or three flats, rubbed grime from the windows to stare out, looked at the sockets for gas-fires, counted the mean little empty rooms.

This evening, seeing Emmeline disappointed, Cecilia was sorry she had nothing more to tell her, and racked her brains. She told her about Tim Farquharson’s new young woman in scarlet, and that fearful battle lying before the Blighs. “And oh,” she said, “Georgina says you’ll be sorry to hear you have lost a client: their vicar’s dead.”

“Who’s dead?”

“The vicar at Farraways.”

“Oh,” said Emmeline, turning away her face.

“Darling, I didn’t know you knew him!”

“He came to tea once, one Sunday. … He and cousin Robert and I had tea out under the lime. It was very sunny, in May. He liked christenings, he said; he said he enjoyed motoring.”

“I’m so sorry he’s dead.”

“Oh well…”

ON SATURDAY Cecilia, pitching her voice rather high out of over-naturalness, asked if Emmeline would be in on Wednesday night. Emmeline thought for a minute: the emptiness of her evenings was carefully kept from Cecilia. “Yes,” she said finally, “why?”

“Markie is coming to dinner; I thought that might be nice.”

Having made this announcement with all the ease in the world, Cecilia became very busy with bright satin patterns spread over her knee—for her trousseau was now well in hand —and did not look up. Shuffling the satins, she was beginning to ask: “What’s happened?” wishing the clock would strike or something go past in the road to disturb the vibrations of what she had just said among the glasses and ornaments, when Emmeline asked quite smoothly, if from a distance: “Why?”

“You see, Julian ran into him the other day, and Markie was so nice and friendly about our engagement and sent me all sorts of messages. So I felt sorry I’d been such a pig: I rang up and asked him to dinner.”

“What made you do that?” said Emmeline.

“I’ve been telling you,” said Cecilia, a shade tartly: she held up a strip of scarlet against the light.

“And he said he’d come?”

“Oh yes; he seemed rather touched: we arranged a day.”

Emmeline looked at Cecilia as though they must both be dreaming. Then turning away her eyes dark with fatigue she picked up from the floor a bright inch of satin that slipped from Cecilia’s knee. She said: “Is this your wedding dress?”

“How could I be married in scarlet? Dove-grey for widows.”

“Did you say I should be there?”

“I don’t remember, I—”

“—Did he ask?”

“I said: ‘We shall all look forward to seeing you’—Julian’s coming, you see.”

“Julian … Did
Julian
want to?”

“Naturally. We shall be four.”

“Cecilia, why did you ask him?”

“Who, Markie? Because he’s a friend of yours.”

“I see. But I don’t see him now.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re not great friends now.”

Cecilia thought: “Then why was he at Devizes?”

Uncertainty and confusion made her shuffle the patterns till she said reasonably: “You mean to say, you’ve quarrelled? I’m sorry, darling. But, as he’s coming,
he
at least must be wanting to make it up. He seemed anxious to come.”

“You must let me off,” said Emmeline.

“Darling, don’t be so childish; it isn’t like you. If
he
can behave—and I’ve never thought that was Markie’s strong point, as you know—surely you can, for an evening across a table? You know you think quarrels are silly: you and I never have them. One’s got to behave. You can’t creep away, it’s all wrong.”

“You must let me off.”

“But I count on you.”

Divided bewilderment, seeing this at once as a trap and a door opening, helplessness, not knowing where to turn, a frightening distrust of Cecilia, who with bright imperious manner seemed ranged with the world against her, all kept Emmeline silent: when at last she said: “I would so much rather not see him,” it was with such despairing inefficacy and such detachment that the battle seemed already lost, or won. Cecilia, not feeling bound to examine the tone too closely, dismissed a suggestion that this could martyrise Emmeline.

“Put him off?” she said briskly. “I don’t well see how I could. How can I be so uncivil when he’s been friendly. We fixed the day: he’d know there was no mistake.”

“Let me be away?” said Emmeline.

Something frightened Cecilia more than she dared admit: it was she who looked young and helpless: with eyes dilating she searched Emmeline’s face. “I don’t understand,” she said “—
does
it really matter?” She sat twisting her ring and knitting her hands together; round her, sadly as fallen petals, patterns littered the floor. “Don’t!” she exclaimed involuntarily. “Darling, you frighten me!”

“I’m sorry: it’s nothing.”

“Has something happened?”

“Only things going wrong.”

“Nothing happened in Paris?”

“No. I was very happy.”

“I knew things were all right,” said Cecilia. “I always trust you.”

“I know,” said Emmeline.

“Then
does
this matter?”

“Not much— Just as you like.”

“Then,” said Cecilia, rallying, “you really are being foolish. You’re making mountains, beloved. Surely poor Markie’s not worth all that.”

“Mountains?” repeated Emmeline, struck by the word.