“He’s gone to the village with Priscilla – ” She broke off and looked frightened, as if she had said something she had meant not to say.
He said of course:
“Who’s Priscilla?”
She said hurriedly, inartistically:
“Oh, darling! George’s girl. She is such a help. Especially just now while Nanny’s laid up with her bad leg. She’s in hospital, poor darling, did you know? I can’t remember if I told you. You’ll have to go and see her, Eddie, she’ll be thrilled to bits.”
“Who’s George?”
She looked reproachful.
“Darling, my brother! You can’t have forgotten. I told you he’d been killed. It was dreadfully unf-fortunate,” she stammered, her face whitening. “And so I said poor little Priscilla could stay here. She had nowhere else to go, poor child.”
“Of course,” he said in mild surprise. “You did quite right. I’m very glad you have her. I daresay she was company for you.”
“Company?” said Linda in a vague nervous voice, not looking at him. “Oh, yes.” She twisted her hands together. “I did write and tell you Daddy was here, darling. I never knew whether you got half my letters. I knew you wouldn’t mind. Where else could he go, once George was dead? And then of course I didn’t like him being in London during all those raids. It wasn’t right. It worried me dreadfully. It was much easier for me to have him here safely under my eye, you do see that, don’t you...? And Great-Aunt Tory, who you don’t know, Eddie; she was an aunt of Mother’s. She’s a perfect pet really, and completely independent, although she’s about eighty.”
“Well, well,” he said brightly. “Who else? Don’t tell me that’s the lot.”
“Eddie darling, you’re not to be beastly,” she said, girlishly tracing the crown on his shoulder with a slim forefinger. “There’s only Nanny Potter, who you asked to come yourself, and the Hausers. They’re an Austrian refugee couple.”
“I didn’t realize from your letters that all these people were actually living in the house, I’m afraid.”
She said evasively:
“Oh, well, perhaps you never got the letters. And anyhow, nothing matters now you’re back. They can all go away if you don’t like them.” Again her face changed colour, as she added: “It will only be for a time, anyway.”
It was not worthwhile pursuing the subject any further. He had suddenly a longing to get out of his hatefully familiar khaki, to boil himself peaceably in the vast old-fashioned bath upstairs for three-quarters of an hour, and then to put on his “demob” suit which a grateful Army had bestowed on him as a parting gift.
“This is home,” he thought, wandering down the familiar corridors with their high cracked ceilings. (“That was done when the buzz bomb fell,” Linda explained, seeing his glance. “There’s a huge crater in the park.”)
“This is home,” he repeated, standing in the big unused drawing room with the chandelier hidden in its holland bag and sheets over the furniture, staring at the ghostly patches here and there marking the walls. (“We had to sell the Van Dyke, Eddie. I couldn’t bear to tell you in a letter. And the little Turner you loved so. I didn’t want to, I wanted to keep it, knowing what it meant to you, but I had a good offer, really good, and they all said I’d be mad not to take it. Eddie, if I’ve done wrong, you’ll just have to forgive me. You know I don’t understand anything about these things, and I have to take the advice of people who do. What was to be done? The Bank were pressing. I had to find two thousand. They said I was very lucky to get seventeen hundred for the Turner and four-fifty for the Van Dyke.” Her eyes were anxious, very blue.)
“This is home,” he reminded himself later in the morning room, feeling like an alien among his guests. They were wonderfully patronizing to him, all of them. All of them, except Priscilla, that is, who leaned shyly up against the bookcase in silence.
“Glad to have you back with us again, my boy,” said his father-in-law encouragingly, looking as handsome as paint with his fine old face and keen blue eyes, his splendid carriage and unshakable conceit. “This calls for a little celebration, what? A bottle of pop! Our little frugal Linda refused to let us crack a bottle on V-E Day. Isn’t she canny? She must have been keeping it for your homecoming, the little monkey!”
Werner Hauser, the Austrian refugee, with a worn tortured face and streaks of white among his black hair, was being sensitively polite to him. Edmund tried hard to pay attention to what he was saying. The other side of the room, sitting exquisitely still, was his wife, “who had been a countess and now couldn’t adjust herself,” he remembered. Her mouth was like a purple snapdragon in her pale face. Her eyes were large and haunting, mahogany-coloured like her hair. She arrested the eye. She sat there quietly, not speaking, her sensual regard fixed on him calmly, so that he was conscious of it all the time. Werner ran his long thin fingers through his hair and went on explaining carefully, in his ill-accented recondite English, the franchise system of Austria.
The old lady said acidly:
“I should think he’d heard enough about Germany to last him a lifetime.”
Werner Hasuer said very politely:
“Excuse me, Miss Sharpe, that I should contradict you. We were speaking of my country – Austria.”
“Same thing.”
“Excuse me. It is not at all the same thing; no more than England and America are the same thing because they speak the same language. Austria was an occupied territory as much as was Denmark or where you will.”
“Well, we don’t want to hear about it, anyway,” she said, decisively, with her sweet old lady’s smile.
“This is home,” thought Edmund, gazing round at their unfamiliar faces as he raised his shallow glass with the others in a toast.
Hesitantly, Linda said:
“Look, Eddie, you won’t mind, will you? The Hausers are in our room. It seemed the most sensible thing at the time, because I converted the old schoolroom for myself when the children had measles; and after, I found it so convenient to be near them, and so much more restful for Nanny that I stayed on up there: We’ll move it round of course tomorrow. But just for tonight if you wouldn’t mind sharing a rather small bed....” she said, blushing violently.
“Oh, I don’t want to disturb you, my dear. I’ll doss down anywhere.” He could have smiled with relief. “I’m so tired I could sleep the clock round anyway,” he added kindly, seeing her trembling lips.
And indeed it was an enormous luxury to be alone and quiet in a room by himself. No more need for pretence. No need to mask his feelings of distress and irritation. There was time to think of what it all meant. Time to think about the future. If there was to be a future. He sat yawning on the end of the bed, pulling odds and ends out of his pockets and tossing them onto the rather ugly, black, veneered-walnut chest of drawers. In the same desultory manner he discarded from his mind the unrelated fragments of his day.
Edmund (lying sleepless on the bed despite his protestations of fatigue) groaned, thinking of Genevieve. He had met her just over a year ago, when he was in the States in connection with some of the training of American troops for D-Day.
It was at one of these banquets for the fostering of international goodwill that he was introduced to Genevieve. He did notice that she was very beautiful, with the intolerable glitter of someone devoted to her own perfecting. He thought her utterly detestable – the kind of woman for whom he had nothing but contempt, a contempt that placed her in value beneath, say, a good professional lousy whore with her front teeth knocked out.
He was very remotely polite; you might just say that he was polite to her. But not attentive. He was so far removed from the urbanites of civilization that he could think of nothing to say to her. His silence was as much a defensive measure as anything else. If he did not speak she would eventually go away. Her voice was soft, very low; pleasant to hear. He listened to her voice rather than to what she was saying.
She was dutifull
y valiant in her attempts to interest this dreary Englishman in his shabby uniform, looking as though he had left his body here but had taken his spirit five thousand miles away. She shot him a quick glance, but he was not looking at her and she was so unaccustomed to not being looked at that that astonished her. She thought him decidedly unattractive, gaunt and rather ill-looking in the artificial light, in his unbecoming khaki, with his khaki-coloured hair and spattering of khaki-coloured freckles, and very likely khaki-coloured eyes if one could see them. Or a very weak, watery blue, perhaps. That would be even worse. She noticed that if she did not speak neither did he. She made desperate signals with her eyes across the room. They could not stand there like two dumb ninnies. Having exhausted all her small talk, she was obliged to start asking him questions – about himself. Men always loved to talk about themselves; every woman knew that.
Did he like New York?
Did he like Washington?
Did he like California?
Where did he live in England?
Kent? Oh, she adored Kent. (That ought to fetch out the snapshots of home and his fat bouncing wife – a jolly good sort!)
Was he married?
He said, No, abruptly. And then flushed, and blurted hastily:
“Look here, you’re not drinking anything. You must let me get you a drink.” And he plunged away into the thick of the crowd and out of sight.
With her beautiful manners it never entered her head that he did not mean to return, and she waited there patiently until the person who had introduced them touched her on the elbow and adjured her to “Snap out of it!” and inquired what she had done with the major.
“He’s gone to get me a drink!”
“I doubt it.”
“How do you mean, you doubt it?”
“Have you any idea how long you’ve been standing here waiting? My guess is that he has passed by this way but once.”
Genevieve was incredulous. Such a thing hadn’t happened to her since the age of fourteen when she wore a disfiguring brace on her teeth. She did waste a moment or two’s thought on him, wondering why he had run away; then she forgot him entirely.
It seemed inevitable that they should from time to time find themselves at the same functions. The first time she was embarrassed to death to find herself sitting next to him at a concert of chamber music. Embarrassed for his sake, of course. Needlessly, as it happened. He didn’t turn a hair, just made her a cool polite little bow, as she made her escape at the end of the first movement and just turned back at door for a quick glance. So that later she was compelled to wonder whether he really had recognized her, or had simply bowed because he had caught her staring.
It arrived at the point where it set her nerves on edge only to see him when she walked into a room. It could spoil an evening for her, merely being aware of his captious critical regard watching her. Sometimes she forced herself to address him, in the attempt to break down this antagonism she sensed in him—or was it in herself? Impossible to tell, for, however well-intentioned she thought she was, her pleasantries always ended in a brisk, ungraceful exchange of discourtesies.
And then, by one of the maddening arrangements of Fate (her own car in dock, and a day of pouring rain), she found herself sharing a taxi with him. In dogged silence. There was doubtless thunder in the air. At any rate, the atmosphere in the taxi was electrical, frighteningly tense. The interior of the cab seemed very dark, very close; for a moment Genevieve feared she was going to faint – which would be an unbearable humiliation. She tried to relax, to breathe deeply... The taxi lurched, and she fell against him. “I beg your pardon,” she said in a stifled voice. To regain her balance she caught at his hand, and at once a fiery anguish ran all over her body, piercing her breasts, turning her bowels to water – a sensation she had never known before. Her mouth was dry. His hand tightened on hers. She was pressed against him, could feel his coarse hairy serge against her cheek and feel his heart hammering against his side. For some reason this made tears prick her eyes. Only when his mouth closed on hers did she stop trembling and was lost in a whirl of liquid gold and sank down into a velvety darkness...
The taxi rattled into the curb and jerked to a stop.
The major said breathlessly:
“I don’t even know your name…”
She said primly:
“Mrs. Hamilton. Genevieve Hamilton.” And laughed weakly.
“Oh, you’re married!” he exclaimed in dismay.
“No, I’m a widow.” In a sudden panic she began fumbling her things together. “I must go.”
“When am I going to see you again?”
“I don’t think I want to see you again,” she said as inoffensively as possible. But he brushed that aside.
“That’s nonsense of course. Have dinner with me tonight?”
“Oh, that would be quite impossible, I’m afraid,” she said in her gentle positive way. His hand closed on her wrist, and again that magical touch arrested her.
“Tonight?” he repeated.
She thought, I must be out of my mind! Why, I don’t even like him!
She said in a hurried muffled voice, as she bent her head to descend from the taxi:
“Call for me at eight.”
*
They were desperately enamored. A glance was enough to set them aflame. It was a queer-enough affair, when one came to think of it; they were so very different from one another that they would always be virtually strangers. Beyond the bare facts of their lives, they had little enough to exchange. They were neither of them talkative people (though Genevieve had her own polished veneer of social chatter), so there was, so to speak, no conversation. Not that either of them felt the lack of it. They were absorbedly satisfied with each other’s mere physical presence, and could share a contented or murmuring silence for hours.
She spoke sometimes of her childhood. She came of an old and exceedingly wealthy Philadelphian family of Quakers, with all the Quakers’ passion for industry and propriety. She was just a little girl to whom nothing had ever happened—nothing, that is, was not utterly becoming and respectable. She had been amazingly sheltered from the harsh glare of reality.
She almost never mentioned her husband, who also had been fabulously wealthy, and as practically innocent as herself. He had been young and ineffectual and sweet. She was nineteen when she married him and he was twenty-two. They were married for six years. And then one summer he was drowned sailing off Cape Cod. They had no children. She was now thirty-one.
As for Edmund, he spoke seldom of the past and never of the future. Some ulterior discretion, or maybe it was some capricious inhibition, prevented his mentioning Linda’s name. With the Englishman’s rectitude it is on the whole unlikely that he was deliberately trying to deceive her; it is more reasonable to suppose that the same power that forbids painful memory sealed his tongue.
And then one day, he had been downtown to collect his mail and was in her apartment reading it while he waited for her, when out of a fold of blue-gray paper spluttered half a dozen snapshots. She entered and saw them lying about his feet as he skimmed frowning through the letter. He stuffed it away hastily when he saw her and rose.
She said, as he kissed her:
“Watch out, darling! Don’t tread on them!”
And together they bent to collect them.
She saw pictures of small children in an English garden, tumbling about with dogs and cats, laughing, except one boy, the biggest, who wore a scowl; that somehow turned her heart over in her breast. In one photo he was frowning into the sun with a kitten in his arms, and his freckles were plain to see.
“That’s Lionel,” he said over her shoulder. “The other two trying to pull ‘Sausage’ in half are Oliver and Jane. The little fair boy is called Charles, I understand.” He added queerly: “I’ve never seen him.”
Staring at Lionel blindly, she could think of nothing to say but:
“He is the image of you, isn
’t he?”
“He is supposed to favor me, I believe.”
She turned away, groping clumsily in her case for a cigarette, fumbling with a lighter. When she was sure of her voice, she said, without looking at him, in a dead-steady expressionless voice:
“Is he your child?”
The question astonished him. He had frankly forgotten that all that chapter of his life was hidden from her. He said:
“Of course he is, Gene.” And added, as if it was an explanation: “They are all my children.”
She made a small involuntary exclamation, a sound that might have been caused by the swift sharp sting of a flame.
“What is the matter?” he asked, and put out his hand.
But she retreated from him and said shakily:
“You lied to me!”
“What?”
“You lied to me! You told me you weren’t married!”
“I did? When?”
She stammered:
“Oh, don’t...! Don’t...! How can you...? The very first time we met... I remember it perfectly. Now I see! That was why you disappeared. You had lied and you were ashamed – ”
He looked confused.
“Yes, I remember it now,” he murmured. “You asked me if I was married and I said ‘No’. I can’t think why. I felt such a fool. I think I just wanted to get away from you. I have always loathed being questioned.”
“But you could have told me later. God, you had a hundred opportunities! Why did you never mention that you had a wife when I was telling you about Paul?” A sudden thought struck her and drove some colour back into her cheeks. “Or is she dead, too?”
He pulled out the blue-grey letter and stared at it.
“No, she’s not dead... Gene, I shall never be able to explain to you what prompted me to keep the truth from you, because I don’t know myself. I think perhaps it was a desire to prolong the fantasy of my life with you by keeping out as much of the real world outside us as possible. The desire to be happy combined with the fear that a chance word might lose it.”
Sting of Death Page 5