“She can’t, but I suppose I could,” said Valentine. “I must try and manage better another time.”
The gentle politeness of this phrase, in return for a stricture that she thought both graceless and unreasonable, was quite automatic.
For more than twenty years now Valentine had been answering with gentle and polite phrases that meant nothing at all, most of the remarks addressed to her. She had been trained from babyhood to think politeness of the utmost importance, and she had never outgrown, nor sought to outgrow, the habit of it. But she was sometimes conscious that her own good manners afforded her a sense of superiority and of that she was slightly ashamed.
She knew that it had annoyed Humphrey, for the Arbell tradition was the blunter, more outspoken one of the British squirearchy. He had once accused her of never losing her temper.
Valentine could not remember what reply she had made to that.
The true answer, she thought, was that it had never been worth while.
“There’s another sardine left, mummie. Do have it.”
“No thank you, darling.”
“Uncle Reggie? Aren’t you going to have it?”
“It doesn’t sound as though I were, Jess.”
“No truly — please do.”
“Go on. Take it. I don’t want it.”
“It would be quite possible to have another tin of sardines opened,” said Valentine. “We’ve really got plenty of those in the store cupboard.”
“I’m glad we’re not reduced to splitting the last sardine,” Jess declared. “Well, if nobody wants it — —”
She got up and helped herself from the dish left on the sideboard.
“Shall I ring, now I’m up? I’ll have finished long before she gets here.”
Ivy’s final appearance was for the purpose of clearing everything off the table, sweeping up the crumbs onto a silver salver, and then putting down three Wedgwood dessert plates each with its glass finger-bowl, a decanter with a very little port in it before the General, and a dish of small red apples.
Jess ate one of the apples and the General made his customary gesture of passing round the decanter, from which no one — not even himself — ever poured out a drink.
“You know,” said Jess, “I often think this house is a bit like a madhouse. The way we sit here, and let Ivy wait on us, and all that business of clearing away for dessert when there isn’t any dessert — honestly, it’s bats, isn’t it?”
“Must behave like civilized beings,” suggested General Levallois, rather wearily and without much conviction.
“Nobody else does. Really and truly. I mean the people at school’s houses that I’ve stayed at, everybody waits on themselves, and it’s practically always supper, not dinner, and nobody dreams of changing their clothes. And at Rockingham, which is the only grand place I ever go to, there’s a butler and a proper dinner. I don’t mean that we don’t get proper food here, mummie, but it isn’t exactly dinner, is it? I mean, not compared to aunt Venetia’s.”
“Your aunt Venetia’s husband is a rich man — or at least he was once. He won’t be now,” said the General, not without an underlying note of satisfaction.
“I bet you, however poor they get, aunt Venetia and uncle Charlie will go on having salmon and roast duck and pheasants and things. Isn’t it awful how one never thinks about anything except food nowadays? Come on, dogs! It’s time you thought about food, too.”
Jess went out, preceded by the dogs, to feed them in the lobby.
Valentine and the General followed, Valentine disentangling the fringes of her shawl from a chair-back.
In the hall she threw another log on the fire, shook up the cushions and emptied an ash-tray. General Levallois remarked, as she had known that he would:
“Can’t the housemaid or one of ’em do that while we’re in the dining-room?”
“I could tell her about it.”
The child of fourteen who, with Ivy and the cook, completed the indoor staff at Coombe had plenty to do already, and did it sufficiently badly. It would be useless to impose fresh duties on her.
Valentine, however, followed her usual appeasement methods almost without knowing that she did so.
“I should, if I were you,” the General assented, as he had done two nights earlier and would do again on the morrow.
“Could you bear it, Reggie, if when Jess has been called up and we’re all by ourselves, we had something more like — well, more like high tea? I don’t mean at five o’clock, but perhaps at half-past six. It would simplify things, and as Jess says, ‘it’s what everybody’s doing’ — except apparently, Venetia and Charlie.”
“I suppose we must give up whatever’s necessary and I’m the last man on earth to complain, but is that really going to make so much difference? I should have thought we’d done plenty as it was. Where’s my whiskey, where’s my tobacco, where’s my after-dinner coffee?” enquired the General rather piteously. “All given up.”
“I know. Well, perhaps we can manage.”
“If we’re to have two soldiers billeted on us, we shall have to. I’m not going to ask any Army man — even an Irishman — to sit down to high tea.”
“I don’t suppose they’ll come.”
The telephone bell rang from the inconvenient and draughty corner, exactly outside the door of the downstairs lavatory, where Humphrey’s father had installed it.
“I’ll go,” shouted Jess from the lobby.
They heard her rushing to it, and the puppy barking.
“There’s no such tearing hurry,” muttered the General. “Come here, Sally!” he shouted. The old dog ambled up and settled down at his feet.
He slowly put on his spectacles and started work on the crossword puzzle in The Times.
Valentine took up her knitting.
She could hear, without distinguishing any words, one side of the telephone conversation. It was evidently someone wanting to talk to Jess. A contemporary, because she was screaming freely and every now and then emitting a shriek of laughter.
Perhaps it was Primrose, speaking from London.
Primrose and Jess often quarrelled when they were together, but they would sometimes hold long, expensive, seemingly friendly talks over the telephone.
Primrose never wrote, unless she wanted something sent from home, and then it was usually on a postcard.
Valentine evaded, as usual, dwelling on the thought of her elder daughter. She reminded herself of the next monthly meeting of the Women’s Institute, of which she was President, and she tried to remember what had been planned for the evening’s programme.
General Levallois asked her help over an elusive clue in his puzzle: she gave it tentatively and unsuccessfully.
“Isn’t it about time to switch on for the news?” he asked suspiciously.
They never missed listening to the Nine O’Clock News, but General Levallois seemed always afraid lest they might do so.
Valentine glanced at the clock, saw that it was only ten minutes to nine, and obediently got up and turned on the wireless.
She shivered as she moved away from the small area of space warmed by the fire. The fringe of her shawl caught in a piece of furniture and she released it.
Jess came plunging back to them, the pup at her heels.
“That was Primrose, and she’s got a week’s leave from Saturday and we’re to expect her when we see her.”
“Is she going to spend the whole week here?” cried Valentine, the blood rushing into her face.
For a moment she felt as she had felt long ago when the children were coming home for their holidays and plans for treats and pleasures for them had thronged her mind.
“She says so. She must be frightfully tired,” said Jess naïvely.
“Did she say how she was? Is she all right?”
“Everything seemed okay. And mummie — this is a frightfully funny thing — what do you think?”
“What?” asked Valentine apprehensively.
She was n
early always afraid now, at the announcement of any news that concerned Primrose.
“She says she knows this Colonel — the Irish one — and he’s a friend of hers. And she’s pretty certain he will come here.”
“That explains her condescending to spend a week in her own home, then,” remarked General Levallois.
“Fancy you thinking of that, uncle Reggie! I wouldn’t know. I suppose he’s one of her boy friends, though I should have thought he was much too old.”
“Did she tell you his name?” asked Valentine. “I mean his Christian name?”
Jess nodded.
“She calls him Rory. Fancy calling a Colonel Rory!”
Valentine was aware that her brother was looking at her, probably with the raised eyebrows of an unspoken question.
It was quite true that he scarcely ever forgot a name, but all the same, he’d want to make certain.
She gave him his answer, but without turning towards him and with her eyes on the fire.
“If his name’s Rory Lonergan, he’s the man I knew years ago, when we were in Rome. Only of course he wasn’t a soldier, then.”
“What was he?” asked Jess.
“A painter.”
“Gosh! Fancy a painter. He must have done jolly well in the war to have been made a Colonel. I shouldn’t have thought a painter would be a scrap of use in the Army, except to paint camouflage or something.”
“He went through the last war, and I believe he did rather well.”
“Is he nice?”
“I haven’t seen him for — let me see — about twenty-eight years.”
“Gosh! You won’t recognize each other. I suppose he’s married and with masses of children.”
“I don’t know,” said Valentine.
“So long as he doesn’t bring any of his wives and children here,” Jessica said. “Actually, Primrose didn’t sound as if he was married. But he must be miles too old for her.”
“Damned nonsense you sometimes talk, Jess,” the General remarked. “Shut up, now! The news is just coming on.”
“It’ll be Bruce,” said Jess, and she threw herself down on the floor beside the two dogs.
The strokes of Big Ben, followed by the voice of the announcer, filled the room.
Valentine, not listening, continued to gaze into the fire.
It really was Rory Lonergan.
She was not surprised. She had felt certain, on first hearing the name of Colonel Lonergan, that it was Rory and that she was going to see him again.
In all the years that had gone by since the summer of nineteen hundred and fourteen, Valentine had thought of Rory Lonergan often but not, after those first few, long-ago months, with any wish or expectation of seeing him.
It was a most innocent story.
She had met him at a petite soirée in the most Catholic circle in Roman society, ten days before her seventeenth birthday. He had fallen in love with her and she with him, and they had met daily, in secret, under the olive tree in a remote corner of the Pincio Gardens near a broken fountain — and Valentine’s mademoiselle had found them out within a fortnight and had told her mother.
Valentine’s mother had told her father and both of them had interviewed the young Lonergan — that raffish-looking, beggarly art student of an Irishman, as her father had described him — and Val had been sent for — she had always been Val, in those days.
She saw again the high room with its painted ceiling and formal decorative plaster mouldings, and her father, very stern and handsome, sitting at a big table that had a lot of gilding about it.
Her mother, who was not stern or handsome but of a tense, nervous, neurotic type far more difficult to resist, had been there too. And Rory had gone.
Instantly, she had thought they had sent him away for ever and had felt a rush of wild, uncontrollable horror and despair. And at once the romantic, fairy-tale hope had followed that he would come back for her and they would go away together and belong to one another for ever and ever.
But none of it had followed the fairy-tale tradition.
Val’s father and mother had scarcely even been angry with her: her father had spoken with cold, rather amused, contempt of young Lonergan, and her mother had said that silly, underhand schoolgirl ways naturally led inexperienced boys to suppose that they might behave as they chose.
In future, had said Lady Levallois, Mademoiselle would exercise a much closer supervision over a girl so little to be trusted.
Almost at once Val had understood that it was over and that there was no hope — but she had made her stand.
“Where is he?”
“Never mind.”
“But he can’t have gone without saying goodbye to me!”
Looking back she could realize the appeal in that childlike wail of despair and she could see why her mother, arbitrary woman that she was of violent, incalculable moods that were a terror alike to herself and others, had suddenly and for a moment softened.
“You may have five minutes to say goodbye. He’s waiting outside.”
No need to ask where.
Lady Levallois’ eyes had turned to the window over-looking the Pincio Gardens, and Valentine had fled.
Fled to the broken fountain, where Rory Lonergan was.
Oddly enough, she could remember very little of their last interview except that he had kissed her in a way in which he had never kissed her before and that she had been frightened and, at the bottom of her heart, shocked.
Whether they had been five minutes together or half an hour, she had never known. It was the kind Madeleine, her mother’s French maid, who had been sent out to fetch her back to the house.
Val had gone, obediently.
Rory Lonergan hadn’t asked her to come away with him.
Indeed, thought Valentine Arbell, looking back at Valentine Levallois in her seventeenth year, nothing could have been less possible than that any penniless youth with his living to earn should make such a suggestion.
In time, the certainty that he couldn’t even have entertained a serious wish to do so became part of her acceptance of the whole episode.
It had been, as Reggie had said, a very silly business, from every point of view except one, and that one was known only to Valentine.
Those innocent and rapturous hours of love-making that she had shared through that brief fortnight with Rory Lonergan, with the hot May sunlight thrusting through the grey-green olive trees, had taught her the meaning of happiness, pure and complete. Never since had she found it.
In the years that had followed, and beneath which youth lay so deeply buried, Valentine had forgotten a great deal: emotionally, she had long forgotten almost everything about Rory Lonergan.
She had only not forgotten what happiness was, nor mistaken for it any lesser experience.
“The damned Japanese ...” said the General. “The damned Americans ... the damned fools we’ve got in the Cabinet ...”
He was meditative, rather than annoyed. Jess said that President Roosevelt was a divine man, and she adored him. She scrambled to her feet and announced that she was going to say good-night to Madeleine, who had a small sitting-room of her own on the second floor.
Valentine knew that Jess would turn on Madeleine’s radio and that together they would listen to the light-hearted and noisy programmes they both enjoyed and that the General would never tolerate downstairs.
In the summer, they would open up the schoolroom again and Jess should have friends to stay and have a little fun....
But before the summer came, Jess would be gone.
“Shall I come and say good-night to you presently?”
“Okay,” said Jess.
She picked up the puppy.
“That dog will lose the use of its legs.”
“Poor darling aunt Sophy! Shall I have to get you a little pair of crutches?” crooned Jess to the puppy.
She sketched a salute in the direction of the General — her usual fashion of evading any good-night formula
— and went away.
General Levallois gave renewed attention to his puzzle and Valentine took up a book. She was glad to read, but she scarcely ever did so before Jess went upstairs from an obscure feeling that Jess might, one evening, want to claim her mother’s attention, and hesitate to interrupt her.
This evening she was paying no heed to her book.
She was thinking, in a strange medley of thoughts, about Primrose’s arrival for her week’s leave and whether there was any way in which it would be possible to make her enjoy it, and about Rory Lonergan whom one might be going to see again — and as Jess had said, they certainly wouldn’t recognize one another — and about Jessica’s announcement, that seemed to Valentine almost fantastically unreal, that Primrose — so emphatically belonging to the present — should claim as a friend of her own the man who had for so long belonged to Valentine’s own far-away past.
Perhaps she was in love with him.
But he was too old. Rory Lonergan must be forty-seven or forty-eight, and Primrose was twenty-four.
Besides, he had probably married long ago. And although, one had to admit, that wouldn’t prevent Primrose from starting what Jess called “quite a thing”, it might well prevent Rory Lonergan from doing so.
The General threw down the newspaper and took off his spectacles, exchanging them for another pair.
That meant that he had failed to finish his crossword puzzle successfully.
“Anything happening to-morrow?”
“It’s Sunday. On Monday I shall be going to the Red Cross work-party in the afternoon, and up to the village in the evening.”
“Another Committee?”
“No. It’s the Monthly Meeting of the Women’s Institute.”
The General made his unfailing rejoinder.
“I suppose you and Mrs. Ditchley will settle the affairs of the nation.”
Valentine gave the polite, unmeaning smile with which she, as unfailingly, received the remark.
She was thinking how very much she wished that she could do more, and more important, war work.
Yet, if Coombe was to remain her home and that of the children, it seemed necessary that she should stay there. Her brother had told her flatly, months ago, that it was the only place in which she could be of the slightest real use.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 515