Friends and Relations

by Elizabeth Bowen

  The Studdart practice of sitting out was in itself perplexing to Rodney, who had not known the sylvan deliciousness of a villa’s garden or ever stared to infinity through a thicket of three hawthorns. He was a countryman. Pressed by the likeable family, Rodney sat out of doors (which became to him “sitting about”) with hardly more enjoyment or spontaneity than that with which he would have paddled or caravanned. With the duress and vigour of country life as his point of departure he took indoors his relaxations and was accustomed to view his fine trees, the dip of his grounds and the rise of his land from the library window. The seasons only turned him from hearth to window, window to hearth. Innocently, he associated this fancy of Colonel Studdart’s with pine-woods, bus-routes, the proximity of a neo-Tudor gable and a portable gramophone. Nowadays, Janet never sat out unless someone desired her company. But if Colonel Studdart was pleased, Rodney was pleased also. And if Janet were unaccountable? He replied—he could not bear her to be away. Her absences, which he would hardly admit as absences, penetrated and racked him. Before death she had ghosts all over the house; she was preceded and followed. So that his library door was never quite shut, and more often than her movements explained he would look up for her shadow on the curved white wall of the stairs. Rodney did not miss Janet when he was out and about, but once in repose he became aware of a strong natural law: she should be by his side. Sometimes when she was dressing to go out he would catch at her hand that was going into a glove. Not always to kiss—simply he could not endure that first little departure.

  So ten years had worked on a calm lover. He put the Observer down on the grass by the chair. Colonel Studdart groaned. Rodney returned to the library: she might soon be back from the garden.

  But it was Hermione who looked round the door.

  “Hullo, Father. I’ve been jumping off the mounting-block.”

  “Good.”

  “Fifty-three times, I did. You can imagine I’m blown.” She swung from the door-handle. “Father…”

  “Hermione?”

  “Oh, all right…I suppose you’d like me to run along.”

  “Why not look for Anna and Simon?”

  “Oh, I see them quite a lot, thank you.” She was gone.

  Hermione had been taught from infancy that she must not disturb her father; there was always, however, just a chance she might not be doing so, so she looked in frequently. Her grandfather, on his visits, seemed anxious to be disturbed and, had she known, Mr. Gibson would have been glad of the same service.

  Lewis Gibson was in the gunroom, trying to work. In his bedroom which, for all the perfection of its appointments, had been arranged with Janet’s dear unintelligence, the writing-table was in the wrong place, and he could hear Hermione jump from the mounting-block twenty-nine out of the fifty-three times. A preposterous child for Janet. In the library there was Rodney, breathing—however quietly. Where he was now, in the gunroom, something seemed likely at any moment to clatter, to fall down. But under the best conditions Lewis never worked well in the country. In the morning he could not settle, towards the end of the morning he felt hungry, in the afternoon it was after lunch, after tea in summer he took exercise and in the evening he felt sleepy. So it became a mistake, from the point of view of ambition, to leave town at all.

  On his return, however, he should have much to report. Affairs at Batts were of momentous interest to Lewis’s circle. He would be able to assure Edward, Considine was now definitely to be out of England by July; he and Laurel might safely commit themselves to the visit. Apart from the exigencies of Whitehall, the times when Edward could visit at Batts were circumscribed. Naturally he must not meet Considine. Though he could not prevent his mother’s going to Batts, her coincidence there with Considine had definitely been interdicted. He maintained a strong prejudice against Laurel’s meeting Considine. (She would have ever so much to ask Lewis on his return.) At one time his children were not to be at Batts with Considine either, on any account. But since a first epidemic had swept the Tilney family, this had relaxed. He wished his children would not call Considine “Uncle” and that Hermione Meggatt need not appropriate Lady Elfrida as “Grandmother.” Between these whirlpools of sensibility, these reefs of umbrage, the two families had, however, steered for ten years an uneventful course.

  Lewis felt that perhaps he ought not to work: Colonel Studdart was on his conscience. The old fellow was at a loss without his wife; the too calm household subdued his innocent bustle. Janet had all a busy woman’s power of being nowhere. She had, it is true, given her father a spud with which he went diligently over her faultless lawns finding never a dandelion, not even a daisy. The Meggatts, uncle and nephew, though friendly were not affable; Edward’s father-in-law had, moreover, with Considine a vague sense that something had once been regrettable. He found his Tilney grandchildren sincere, sensible, too polite; Hermione a tornado, without curiosity. So the old fellow returned to Lewis. They chatted. An unequivocal success of this kind, in any direction, was grateful to Lewis.

  So Lewis got up several times and looked out of the window. But Colonel Studdart was still asleep…At last, in despair, Lewis strolled out on to the terrace.

  He yawned, drawing deep into his lungs the kind ennui. “So here we all are,” he remarked (though they were none of them visible). He eyed the broad white afternoon; the horizon was low, displacing only a little sky; the shrubberies from each side of the house ran out like arms. “Well in…” said Lewis. (He meant: into life, and spoke for them all, from the early thirties; timed, approximately, with the season and afternoon.) “Getting along nicely,” he added.

  Now the scene, below, had a moving figure. Janet came out from the trees in the direction of the garden, to sit with her father. But he was still asleep, he did not even groan; she was nonplussed. Here she was, quite thrown back on herself—she did not look up at the house. Lewis wondered what she would do. In the dark shade of the beech she remained upright, oblivious sentinel of oblivion, a little behind his chair. Her hand moved slowly over the chair-back, not touching the wicker, moulding the air above; she did not quite smile. So, intimate, she could have been. In proximity to the beloved one caresses the chair—in speaking or not speaking—the curtain, or else the grass, the tree-trunk, glad of texture that electrifies curiously to the touch. What passed under her fingers now?

  Evidently she had forgotten Colonel Studdart.

  Some telescope brought her up to Lewis’s eye, distinct but unforgettably distant. His view of her was unique: he could not account for this. Then he understood; solitude is in its nature invisible; he had never looked for so long at anyone who was alone.

  2

  Lewis’s sister, Marise, was at present in the Tyrol with her fierce friend Theodora. With regret, he saw little of Marise at any time. At twenty-six she was aloof, important, with a cool little air of sufficiency that discredited marriage: she could command from any quarter a temperate admiration. She lived in a flat with Theodora, off Ebury Street. The claims of this rather neutral friendship of Theodora’s were a relief to Mr. and Mrs. Thirdman, who enjoyed without any disturbance their cottage in Sussex. They rallied, in fact, to something a little beyond them when, on infrequent Sundays, the composed profiles of the two young women slid past the cottage windows and the car turned with precision in at the small yard gate.

  Theodora no longer bullied her parents—they had, perhaps, the slightest possible sense of a deprivation—her energies flowed out in other directions now. It was hard to know what to talk to the girls about; they were tall and seemed oppressed by the low ceilings. They preferred, however, standing to sitting, and had, while Mr. and Mrs. Thirdman anxiously talked, the air of reserving their judgement. Their professions remained above discussion; they did not care for the theatre, did not have friends who married….“And Theodora, who have you been meeting?” “Well—really, Mother, it would be difficult to explain.” Theodora was handsom
e now (they had it on good authority), still big-boned, still arrogant, still short-sighted. She saw little, but regretted, you could be certain, little that she had missed.

  Once the girls had brought Lewis, who did sit down and was most reassuring. The Thirdmans’ family life became natural at once; they had feared sometimes it must be exceptional. And Lewis’s life was full of small difficulties he seemed glad to discuss. As to his friends—he was indiscreet winningly. He opened vistas of speculation down which the Thirdmans delightedly wavered. They had had no idea, for instance, that Edward was difficult…They could not have said Lewis gossiped, but they did feel he would have been a more natural friend for the daughter they might have had. They asked him to come again, and heard years afterwards from the Studdarts that he had still a lively intention of so doing.

  This Whitsuntide there could be of course no question of any reunion, since Theodora and Marise were in the Tyrol. The Thirdmans spent Whitsun happily in their garden, an island between the roaring bus-routes. But Lewis at Batts grew melancholy, for some reason, as the Sunday drew out. Tea did not cure him, and the church bells made further inroads on his composure. He felt he had no attachments.

  Now dinner was over, the cool May night, scentless, stood along the tall windows all half open. Far down the drawing-room a fire of beech, a fanciful summer fire lit for the eye, orientated the party. Nothing was said, and as nothing but Lewis’s melancholy remained unspoken the lamplit air of the room was like still, clear water.

  Janet came from the fire and halted, for no reason, where Lewis leaned on the window, his elbow along the sash.

  “Well…” said Lewis.

  “I believe it’s cold,” said Janet, and stretched out of doors a bare inquiring arm.

  Lewis took the remark as confidential. “Would you like me to shut the window?”

  “It’s just that Considine…” She followed with her eye the line of a possible draught from the window to the back of Considine’s neck. Lewis shut the window. “Such a nice day,” he added, looking back regretfully for all he had missed.

  She smiled, pleased: the day here was her own. He sighed, but as his happiness was on record she did not endeavour to understand him. She took little account of variations in Lewis—or for that matter, in anyone. “Come back to the fire.”

  But Lewis said confidentially: “Hermione tells me she jumped off the mounting-block sixty-nine times. Do you think that can be good for her inside?”

  “Fifty-three—I don’t know, Lewis; she’s so independent. I can’t keep forcing Anna and her together. And Simon and she fight.”

  “Those are interesting children,” said Lewis, who did not care for the Tilneys.

  “They are, aren’t they,” agreed Janet, without interest. “I must say, they’re devoted to Considine.”

  “Does Edward mind?”

  “I’ve no idea,” said Janet. “I don’t think he knows.”

  “How do you think Edward is?” said Lewis, leaning back against the shutter luxuriously.

  “I haven’t seen him for more than a moment for nearly a year. He took me out to lunch before the Flower Show. He told me he had been speculating a little. I said I was so glad. Is he still?”

  “Very cautiously,” replied Lewis.

  “Well, he ought to be cautious,” said Janet, thinking of Laurel.

  “Lady Elfrida, you know, speculates too fearfully.”

  Janet did not take this in. “I haven’t seen Laurel since Easter,” she continued. “It will be nice when she and Edward are here in July. I thought we might all—”

  But at this point Rodney turned from the fire to look for Janet. Why should she have a fire lit for them all, then stand by the window? Followed by Lewis she returned to the sofa and sat down. Her husband, her father, her husband’s uncle all sat down, with an air of having gained their point. “I was saying,” she told them, “that in July, when Laurel and Edward are here, we might all…” But Lewis remembered a look, an equally even and dark look, that, leaving the window, she had exchanged with the night.

  They had exaggerated, however, Hermione’s independence. “Ho!” Janet’s daughter exclaimed, upstairs, at about half-past nine, and as Anna took no notice repeated the challenge. The little girls were sleeping together.

  “Wazzat?” asked Anna. Then she sat up, alert. But the house once again was not on fire. Nothing had stopped, either; she could hear a train round off its curve of sound in the hollow distance. The night was fixed: she just saw the windows, Hermione’s low little oval mirror. The white glossy curtains moved now and then, like someone taking a step forward then standing still. Anna had heard of fear but marvelled at it. She sat up now to stare, vigorous as a crocus in her little sheath of assurance.

  “What do you want, Hermione?”

  Hermione explained that Anna had been asleep. Anna said, No; she was just lying.

  “Well, you lie very flat,” said Hermione. “Do you miss the traffic?”

  “We don’t have traffic where we live.”

  “But I thought in London…” persisted Hermione.

  “Well, we don’t. Neither does our grandmother.”

  “Oh, I’ve stayed with her. When shall I come and stay with you, Anna?”

  “Mother says you’re too accustomed to nannies.”

  Criticism second-hand was distasteful to Hermione, as to any of us. “I don’t have nannies,” she said hotly. “I have a maid, she’s Swiss and I’m not accustomed to her. Then what did Uncle Edward say?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Anna, bored. “I don’t suppose he said anything.”

  “Then what did Grandmother say?”

  “She’s not your grandmother, Hermione; she’s not even your aunt. You can’t have everybody you know.” Anna was quite right in thinking Hermione spoilt. Unfortunately she went on for too long. “I never heard of anybody like you, Hermione, wanting to have everybody and everything. I tell you I never heard…”

  “I don’t want anybody’s old grandmother!”

  “But you love her,” said Anna, shocked.

  “I don’t want anybody’s old cousins either,” went on Hermione wildly, thumping her pillow in the dark.

  Lady Elfrida had said she did not see how a Meggatt could possibly be so excitable. Janet could not account for this either. At Trevor Square, Hermione had stampeded the Siamese, screamed in Harrod’s (she thought she was lost), screamed at Maskelyne and Devant’s (not a fortunate choice of Lady Elfrida’s) and when she was left at home played Jezebel with a teddy-bear on the balcony, attracting a small crowd. Lady Elfrida found herself quite annoyed, and was surprised till she recollected Edward. For here she was in charge of a highly strung child again: something-or-other about cycles…But Edward’s excitement had been ingrowing.

  Miniatures of the two little girls hung on a plaque in Lady Elfrida’s bedroom, with Simon’s above them. Simon could be left out of any discussion, he was a pure Studdart with a square head like his grandfather’s. (Disappointing: Laurel had passed on worth but not distinction.) Whereas Anna Tilney had quite a touch of her aunt Janet’s distinction—not Edward’s—a fine pale little gloomy face, just so curved at the jaw and temples as to escape squareness. She, however, might have had no eyelids, she never looked down. Her look, which was uncomplex, attached itself to an object with almost passionate rationality. She was fair, like Laurel, and would have been a suitable daughter for Rodney. She embarrassed Lady Elfrida and put even Mrs. Studdart constantly in the wrong, for she was a born granddaughter.

  Finally, Hermione was fair, ash-blonde—there was to be no variety—with the inevitable Meggatt chin. Her eyes, red-brown like the flesh of a prune, were set too near in, too deeply, over her high-bridged nose with its arched nostrils. Her look flickered, darted, and when it wanted to fix an object stole on it sideways—feverish child of Janet’s. When she was tired
her eyes had a very slight cast. In vain did her mother take her to the oculist. She looked an excitable little liar and sometimes lied.

  “Well, I can’t help it, Janet,” said Lady Elfrida tactlessly, after a third return from the oculist’s. “You should have had dark children. Apparently she’s not even short-sighted; I’m certain she doesn’t live in a world of her own. I don’t know what you’re to do.” She would have been sorry, however, to have missed Considine’s great-niece.

  —This in parenthesis—At present Anna, annoyed, had turned on the light and was getting out of bed without a word. Hermione understood that this was awful.

  “Where are you going?” she asked humbly.

  “In to Simon.”

  “Oh, Anna, listen; do stop, Anna! I’ll tell you a secret idea.”

  “Simon and I have got secret ideas, thank you,” said Anna coldly. This was likely to happen to Hermione throughout life; she was more unfortunate than she knew.

  “Listen—I’ll call her my un-grandmother, and you shall call him your un-great uncle?”

  “He’s the same relation to us whatever we call him.” But Anna did so far relent as to sit on the side of her bed, still with the light on. (As a matter of fact, Simon bored her.) She swung her strong little feet and curled her toes. A Good Shepherd that had been Janet’s looked down at both lambs with an impartial sweetness. Yet Anna had throughout an almost divine advantage. Hermione made a desperate effort to entertain her.