Venus Over Lannery (7 page)

“What about, the rest?” Elsdon asked as they got into the.car. “Have they all turned up?”

“The Buxteds and Edna and Frank Todd are here,” she said. “The rest are coming later. Daphne and Eric are coming by road.”

Elsdon pricked up his ears. “Daphne and Eric? Do I understand that there has been a—what shall we call it?—a reshuffle?”

Cynthia laughed. “Surely a man can give a girl a lift without . . .?”

“O, certainly!” said Elsdon. “But what about our actor?”

“Roy's not coming,” said Cynthia. “I invited him, but when he heard Daphne was coming he asked to be excused.”

“So he's still in full flight?”

“Still?”

“Since the London-New York incident.”

“Dear me, no!” said Cynthia. “They've quarrelled and made it up several times since then.
At present they're quarrelling: that's all. Of course it's very childish.”

The hood of the car was open and Elsdon breathed-in the pure spring air, deliciously tepid where the road ran through naked sunshine, then suddenly cool and sharp as they dived into a hissing tunnel of beech-boughs whose buds had burst here and there into clusters of green-winged butterflies. The young people he was so soon to meet again emerged one by one in his memory and took on something of their faded reality. He roused himself. “And how is the extremely pretty girl, the one Eric was rather sweet on? Is she still engaged to the fair young man?”

“Joan? My dear Uncle George”—Cynthia and Eric had always called him Uncle George—“they've been married for at least two years.”

“Heavens,” said Elsdon, “I'm hopelessly behind the times. Is there anything else I ought to know?”

Her colour rose, but she did not reply until they had turned into the Drydens' gate. “I think you ought to know that I'm engaged to be married.”

“Bless my soul,” said Elsdon aloud to himself, “that explains it.”

“Explains what?” she asked, laughing.

“Explains you, my dear. But your mother said nothing of it in her letter.”

“There was nothing to say till yesterday.” “Tell me who it is,” said Elsdon, “and I'll congratulate you if I can.”

“Mother has congratulated me several times
already,” she said, “in spite of her prejudice against the Church.”

They had reached the front door. A man was coming down the steps: as the car stopped he opened the door and Elsdon recognised Todd. He seized his hand. “I congratulate you both most heartily,” he said.

Hearing the car, Emily and the Buxteds had come out into the hall to welcome him. In the drawingroom, where tea was waiting, a young woman was standing near one of the windows. She turned, as Elsdon entered, and came towards him, alert and self—possessed, holding out her hand. “I don't believe you recognise me, Mr. Elsdon.”

“Indeed I do,” he said, taking her hand; “though I must confess that for a moment I didn't. But I refuse to take the blame. I said good-bye, the other day, to a girl student and you face me suddenly with a full-blown doctor.”

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Quite!” said Elsdon.

“You've been told?”

“No. It's obvious.”

It was even more obvious during tea. She was no longer the intelligent child, as she had been on the former occasion, ready enough to respond, but not ready to make advances. She was a grown-up now among grown-ups, on equal terms, it seemed, with all of them. You felt at once when talking to her that she did not merely accept you: she dealt with you. But Elsdon did not fully appreciate the change
in her until, while dressing for dinner, he overheard a brief conversation between her and Roger. His room must once have communicated with theirs, but the door had been replaced by a cupboard in each room. Elsdon had left his cupboard door open and their voices were clearly audible. It was Edna's that he heard first.

“You made a great nuisance of yourself, Roger, by not taking the train you were supposed to take.”

Roger's voice was surly. “Well, whose fault was that? It was understood that I should wait for you at the flat.”

“It certainly was
not.
I told you I would come down by the morning train unless I had another appointment. I told you, if I wasn't there and had left no message when you came in, to follow by the two fifteen. I made myself perfectly clear.”

“I too made myself perfectly clear. I told you quite definitely that I would wait till you turned up.”

“You behave like a stubborn child, Roger. You knew perfectly well that I wouldn't turn up if you waited till Doomsday, but you were determined to make your absurd protest. And what good did it do you? You merely punished yourself and gave a lot of trouble to our friends here. Goodness only knows why you should want to force me to spend six hours in Town with nothing whatever to do, when I might be in the country. You know very well that I've had a very hard week of it.”

“Well, I've had a hard week of it too.”

“Then why make it harder still by wasting two precious hours sitting sulking in the flat?”

Silence followed, broken only by occasional footsteps. Elsdon, tying his black tie with his usual slow precision, smiled drily to himself in the glass. What had become of the obedient little dog that, so recently, as it seemed to him, had trotted so faithfully after her master? The inevitable change had come with a vengeance and it was clear that Roger did not like it. No wonder, when he had trained the little dog so carefully.

But before that interesting bit of eavesdropping had been forced upon him Elsdon had made other discoveries. When tea was over they had all drifted into the garden, which was already bright with the clear yellows and blues of springtime. Droves of daffodils spread from the shadows of the trees to the sunny edges of the lawn, and, in the shorter grass, lilac-coloured crocuses stood wide open to the afternoon sunlight, transparent and luminous as if with a light of their own. And, while they were admiring the flowers, Eric and Daphne drove up and, leaving the car, came towards them across the lawn. Both were in high spirits. But how rapidly, thought Elsdon, the years told on these young creatures. Daphne had aged, slightly but very noticeably. The flesh had sunk and tightened about her mouth, giving her, just there, an old and hungry look which assorted ill with the little girl that she still presented to the world. For it was evident, from the first moment of their arrival, that Daphne was as artfully
innocent as ever. She was out to enjoy herself and it was plain, from the gaily proprietary manner with which she treated Eric, that she was anxious to display the fact that she had got him in tow. And Eric obviously enjoyed it: his brown eyes glowed with a dark satisfaction. It was all very well, thought Elsdon, for Cynthia to brush aside his suspicion: he had not the smallest doubt that there was something between them. Well, if Eric was consoling himself for the loss of that pretty little Joan, so much the better, so long as he did not console himself to the point of marriage. That, Elsdon thought, would be a thousand pities. As a permanency Eric deserved something better than this absurd little automaton, just as Joan, to his thinking, deserved something better than that superficial, fair young man whose name he had forgotten. Still, Joan, after all, had had her choice. Presumably she had known which of the two would suit her best.

But, when Joan joined them an hour later, Elsdon found himself more than ever doubtful if she had chosen rightly. It was not that a renewed inspection of her choice revealed him in an even less favourable light, for Joan came alone, explaining that her husband had been prevented. It was the change in Joan herself that increased Elsdon's doubts. All the youthful bloom that had so appealed to him had left her. It was not that she had aged; it was simply that she had faded. And she had lost, too, her look of inner contentment: it was obvious that she was very unhappy. Elsdon watched her with a deep concern.
He longed to help and protect her, but what could he do? He was painfully conscious of the impassable barrier between her unapproachable youth and his old-man's case-hardened sympathies. But Emily, bless her, had none of his cramping disabilities, and he was glad to see her and Cynthia take possession of the poor little thing and lead her away apart from the others. And throughout the evening he noticed how marvellously Emily responded to the girl's need, bringing it about, as if by accident, that Joan should sit next her at dinner and next her or Cynthia in the drawing-room afterwards. Already at dinner some traces of the former Joan had returned: it was as if she had arrived frozen with cold and were already reviving visibly in the warmth of human affection.

But while Elsdon was delighted by the quiet solicitude of the Drydens, he was exasperated by the behaviour of Eric. It was obvious that Eric was deliberately displaying in front of Joan his preoccupation with Daphne. No doubt it was only human that he should be moved to show her how completely he had recovered from her rejection of him; it might even be pleaded in his favour that the pains he was taking to show his indifference were a measure of what his feelings for her had been and still were. But couldn't the young ass see that she was suffering? Had he no perceptions and no human decency? Not that Joan seemed troubled by his behaviour: she was too securely guarded by the care of Emily and Cynthia for that. None the less, Elsdon
longed to take him aside and give him a good dressing-down. As for Daphne . . .! But what did Daphne matter? Being Daphne, she could not be expected to behave otherwise. Besides, she, no doubt, had her own fish to fry: no doubt she was eager to show the company that Roy's absence meant less than nothing to her. What a restless, unbalanced lot these young people were. He glanced at Edna, then at Roger. Each was talking with great animation and each laboriously pretending meanwhile that, whoever else might be in the room, the other was conspicuously absent. Cynthia and Todd were the only sane ones. Each, Elsdon could see, was so securely happy in the presence of the other that they did not need to exchange a word or a glance.

The loss of Joan had left Eric stranded. For a year and a half she had been the centre about which all his thoughts and actions had revolved, and now, deprived of that centre, his life, it seemed, had come to a standstill. He took his disaster reasonably, and that, perhaps, made it the harder to bear. Resentment would have acted as an antidote by giving him an outlet for his emotions and so hastening his recovery. But he felt no resentment against Joan: she had made him no promise, had never treated him as anything more than a friend. He carried on his daily job at the office as usual, met his friends and talked and laughed, but he felt himself doing these things like an automaton, not of any will of his own, but from sheer force of habit. At first he had consoled himself with the resolve that he and Joan should remain friends, and when, a few months after her marriage, the chance came to meet her again, he did not avoid it. He believed that he had so far recovered himself that the meeting would help him to regain his balance. It would be a return to reality, he would realise, when they met, that, as a friend at
least, she was still his, that his life was not really so empty as he had been imagining. But the meeting, when it came, was a painful disillusionment. At the first sight of her, as she came towards him smiling, with hand outstretched, so overwhelmingly more vivid than she had been in his memory, the old emotions rushed back. He stood before her dumb and bewildered, hardly able to hear what she said or stammer a reply. Her very cordiality, showing him how little she entered into his feelings for her, seemed to him an affront. He hurried home, sick at heart, angry with himself, angry with her, determined never to see her again. It was as if his disaster had repeated itself and he had to live it down a second time.

In the months that followed he dropped back into his former apathy. Then, quite suddenly, he grew impatient with it and woke up. He had become, as he imagined, a rather cynical young man, quite ready for a little fun, but determined not to hand himself over for another girl to make a fool of.

It was in this precarious state that he ran across Daphne again. He had not seen her since that afternoon when he had met her at Waterloo on her return from New York. He had always rather liked Daphne. Her lively flippancy entertained him, and her childishness, which it had never occurred to him to suspect, provoked in him a somewhat fatherly attitude towards her. And now, half-way up the Haymarket, he saw her strutting in her birdlike way towards Piccadilly Circus, a few yards ahead of him.
He called to her and she whisked round. How amusing it was to see her again. She gazed up at him, blue-eyed, innocent, absurdly small, with a roguish smile. “You're looking very bright,” she said. “Have you come into a fortune, Eric, or are you engaged?”

“Neither,” he said. “In fact, I'm unusually disengaged, and, that being so, let's go and have tea somewhere.”

Under the surface of lively chatter across the table for two, each curiously examined the other. “What's happened to him?” Daphne asked herself. “He's woken up. He used to be such a solemn, friendly, immovable old thing. Now he looks at one as if . . .” She caught his eye, watching her. “It's ages since we met,” she said to him. “What have you been doing all this time, Eric?”

“Doing?” he said. “Nothing!” And as he said it he realised the truth of it. He had been doing nothing all this time: he had been living in a state of suspended animation.

“Nothing?” she said. “How delightful! I wish I could do nothing for a change.”

“And what
have
you been doing?” he asked.

“O, thousands of things,” she said with a sigh; “frittering away my life on thousands of idiotic things.”

“Well,” he said, “it seems to suit you.”

“Suit me?” Her eyes danced.

“You don't look a day older than when we last met.”