“Then you will back me up?”
“Yes.” He came forward and held out his hand to help her to her feet, and they walked arm-in-arm over to the window. The sun was now low in the west, and the long, warm rays turned the red cliffs across the Sound into a wall of flame.
Dr. MacIntyre was thinking about his promise. I’ll see that she gets to London, to any place where she can have a chance to be free. If she stays with her family she will have all the life crushed out of her. She will be filled with inhibitions. She will be blackmailed by security. And all her vitality will be drained out of her, and her mind will become a dead thing, and she will be—charmingly, sweetly, prettily—only half alive. Charles Lorrimer has moulded Mary. He is not going to repeat that pattern with Penelope if I can help it.
“You will find London hard, you know,” he said. “You will be less comfortable than you are at home. And you may be lonely at first. England can be a lonely place.”
“I know.” She hugged his arm. “But there are other things too. If I don’t make a fight for them now, then I’ll never get them. Later on I’d be too old to fight. Or I would have forgotten how.”
“I imagine you have still quite a way to go before you reach that stage. But it is just as well to make up your mind early in life. One life is too short, Penny; two would be much better. In the second one you could put into practice what the first one had taught you.” He turned away from the window, and he walked back to the fireplace. His voice became serious. “Now remember, my girl, if you go to London and have this freedom you are crying for, don’t confuse freedom with foolishness. You won’t, will you?”
Penny shook her head solemnly. And then she smiled, with so much humour in her expressive face that he smiled too.
“Well,” he said, “that’s that!” and settled into his armchair.
“Thank you. You are a darling,” Penny said. But she still did not leave. Dr. MacIntyre looked pointedly at his abandoned newspaper.
“Did you have a nice afternoon?” Penny went on.
What’s coming now, he wondered. “Very pleasant, thank you.”
“I’m afraid your work was badly interrupted today.”
To have one’s simple pleasures interrupted is worse, her grandfather thought. He answered casually, “Oh, I rather enjoyed it. Bosworth is interesting. What we call ‘good material.’ I can see why Chaundler takes such an interest in him. The most rewarding thing about being a teacher, you know, is to winnow the grain from the chaff.”
“Then you did like him?”
The rich light from the western window filled the room. Its colours now became alive, warm and soft, as they lay bathed in the golden rays. It was the best moment of the day, he thought.
Penny said anxiously, “Or didn’t you like him?”
He roused himself. “Like whom? Young Bosworth? Of course I liked him. Would I have spent two hours with him if I hadn’t?” He closed his eyes. Time for forty winks...one of the rights of advancing age...very pleasant, too. He stretched his legs comfortably as the door closed behind Penny, and settled in his chair contentedly.
* * *
In the hall, square-shaped and furnished like a sitting-room so that the visitors would not be eternally in the study, Moira was sitting with more comfort than elegance on the small couch. Some official-looking periodicals and Blue Books lay beside her, but on her lap was a fashion magazine. She looked up guiltily, and then, seeing it was only her sister, opened the magazine again.
“Don’t work too hard,” Penny said.
Moira glanced at the periodicals. “I’ve some notes to make before supper,” she said. “Provided, of course, that I am not interrupted.” She looked pointedly at Penny, who had sat down on the arm of the couch and had picked up a League of Nations pamphlet on minorities in Europe.
“You’ll manage it,” Penny told her. “You still have five minutes left.”
“As late as that?” Moira looked indignant. She said sharply, “What on earth were you talking about in the study? I was timing myself by you.”
“About London. I say, Moira”—Penny had picked up a bulletin on white-slave traffic, hidden under the other pamphlets, and opened it with interest—“you do have to read pretty widely for modern history, don’t you?”
Moira took the bulletin quickly out of her hands and replaced it under the others. “I wish you’d leave things alone,” she said crossly. “And what about London? Do you mean you really are trying to go there next winter? You could very well put in another year in Edinburgh and go later. As I am doing.”
“Are you?”
“Look, stop fiddling with my papers and let me do some work! I’ve done absolutely nothing all month, and I have so much to do.”
Penny picked up the fashion magazine, and turned over its glossy pages. For a moment she had been afraid that Moira would jump to the right conclusion.
And then Moira—trust Moira—looked up again and said, “Don’t tell me you and David Bosworth were talking economics!”
“Of course not.”
“He is taking a degree in something like that, isn’t he? Wasn’t that what George Fenton-Stevens told us?”
“Did he?” Penny seemed not in the least interested. “Look, Moira. Isn’t that a marvellous dress? I’d love one like that.”
Moira glanced at the advertisement. “Black,” she said. “Much too old. You’d never be allowed to have it. What did he talk about, then? You were an awfully long time with him.”
“Oh, nothing very much. Just this and that.” Penny’s voice was bored.
Moira waited, but there was no more information. Had he really been dull, after all? Her irritation with Penny began to pass. She said, her voice dropping into the usual tone of one-sister-to-another, “You know, he is rather attractive, isn’t he? Which is strange, because he isn’t what you would call good-looking. Of course, he is very tall. Tall men don’t have to be handsome, somehow.”
“Here is someone still taller,” Penny said, showing her sister another advertisement. “The women in these drawings are always eight feet tall, always absolutely slender, always young and beautiful. Do you think that real women imagine they will look like that if they could only buy these dresses?”
“Well, you ought to know. You rather fancied yourself in that black dress, didn’t you?”
“It would look nice even on someone who was only five feet five and a half inches,” Penelope said stubbornly. “And it takes a young complexion to wear black attractively.”
“Just try that idea on Mummy, and see how far you get with it.”
Penny discarded the magazine and wandered over to the front-door. Then she walked out over the slope of green grass. She looked towards the Sound. I am as restless as the sea, she thought. How I wish I were old. At least twenty-five, perhaps even thirty. No, thirty was too old. Twenty-five was better. When you were old you wouldn’t have this crushed feeling inside you; you would not need to make up dreams about life. When you were young they always ended the wrong way somehow. How often she had sat on the west shore, painting, dreaming, talking inside to herself. And she had always ended by thinking what a perfect place it was to have someone else to talk to, someone who knew what you wanted to be said, someone who didn’t interrupt or laugh at the wrong places and who would talk as if he knew what you were thinking. And sometimes he would not talk at all, leaving well enough alone. Today had been that kind of day. And, of course, it had to be spoiled. Perhaps David Bosworth had become bored: he must know so many girls in Oxford and London, pretty girls, amusing girls, girls old enough to wear smart little black dresses. Or who wore them, whether they were old enough or not. She looked down at her woollen sweater and flannel skirt, at her flat-heeled brogues and smooth stockings. Bare legs were indecent, they said. She shook her head and sighed. If she were old, then she would never feel that she was being laughed at. Had he been laughing at her? “Oh, damn!” she said suddenly, and then looked quickly round. There was no one there to overhe
ar. “Damn and blast!” she said.
There was only one thing to be thankful for. Moira had not seen how happy she was when she came back from that walk. Then her sister would have questioned and teased her for days, until she would come to hate the sound of Bosworth. And how Mother would have lectured: silly ideas, romantic nonsense. Perhaps they were silly and romantic. But that did not explain why she should have been so happy, and then, as David walked away with George Fenton-Stevens and Captain MacLean, not happy at all. That couldn’t be explained. And you couldn’t ask advice about it, either. Not even from Grandfather. This wasn’t something like going to London. This was something you hid inside yourself and never even let anyone guess about. And never, most of all, David Bosworth.
Betty was calling, “Penny, you are late again.”
Penny turned towards the house.
“What’s wrong, Penny? Are you all right? Supper is ready, and we are all waiting.”
“Of course I’m all right.”
Betty blew out the corner of her mouth at a heavy lock of fair hair, too short to be held in place. Last week she had cut a fringe to look like Cleopatra’s, and then she had not liked it. Now she was plagued by its refusal to be brushed back.
“I’ve finished another chapter of my book,” she announced. “It’s thrilling. You will read it tonight, won’t you?” Penny would always read things when you asked her to, but Moira would always say that she would read them when they were published some day. Betty thought, I’ll be a writer, a real writer with words all in print, and I’ll show Moira.
“All right,” Penny said, hiding her amusement. For Betty remembered she was going to be a writer every two months or so, and then she would dash off another chapter. Its length depended on the time she had to spare. “How long is this chapter?”
“Pages and pages—three or four. My hero is caught in the rapids. He’s almost killed. And I have a new idea for the title. Perils of the Amazon. How do you like that?”
“What was the first one, again?”
“First it was Smugglers of the Orinoco, and then I thought of Dwellers of the Zambezi, and then—”
“It is the same story, isn’t it?”
Betty looked at Penny in surprise as they entered the house. “Why, of course!”
“Versatile... ” Penny said. She restrained herself until they had entered the dining-room, and then she could pretend to be smiling to everyone round the table. “Betty and I were discussing titles. I say, Betty, why don’t you just list all the titles, and that would be a story in itself? You could call it Variations on a Theme.”
“Sh!” her mother said warningly, and inclined her head towards their waiting grandfather. Penny bowed her head as the others were doing, but her eyes were not closed, and she studied her mother’s face as it registered thankfulness. It was just as Penny had thought when she had first entered the dining-room: her mother had been crying. She remembered, then, that there had been no reproach for being late for supper. She looked quickly towards her grandfather. He had finished saying Grace, and he was now admitting nothing beyond the excellence of the food.
Penny was very subdued and very polite for the rest of the evening.
“I wonder if Penelope is catching something,” Mrs. Lorrimer confided to her father, as the girls at last went upstairs to bed, and she prepared to follow them.
“Probably just thinking. It is a painful process for anyone. Good night, Mary. And don’t worry, my dear.”
* * *
But Dr. MacIntyre, as he lifted his pipe from the ashtray and stretched his legs before the fire, which had been lit against the chilly night air, was puzzling over Penny, too. Why had she paid that special visit to him this evening? London ostensibly. But David Bosworth indirectly? Stuff and nonsense, he thought irritably. And then he tried to imagine how he had felt and thought and acted when he was nineteen. But those years were too far away.
And it was only in moments like those he had experienced this afternoon—Bosworth’s energy, his revolt against the state of acceptance; Penny’s vitality and warmth—that he could have the fleeting sensation of remembering exact emotions in his own youth. As if each year dropped a thin veil over the preceding year, and as you got farther away from the years of youth the accumulation of veils became a thickness substantial enough to conceal and hide. Only in certain moments, when some memory stirred, was that thickness slit through. Suddenly, and only for a brief interval. “There I am,” you said, looking at youth. And then you looked at yourself and said, “No.” And you added, “There I was.” And so you let the slit in the veils close again, and let your thoughts keep the even pace of your body. The veils, some bright, some sombre, fell together, and they lost all particular colour and merged into a gentle grey.
Dr. MacIntyre looked at the photograph on the mantelpiece. You’ll never be a philosopher, he told himself: you were too happy with her. He smiled as he looked up at his wife. “Weren’t we, lass?” he said.
6
TALK FOR A GREY DAY
The Lodge at Loch Innish was a pugnacious place. You felt it could face any odds—Norsemen, raiding clans, winter storms, or the yearly invasion of its grouse moors. Even its recent embellishments of lawn and driveway, of tennis-court and rose-garden, could not alter its essential function. It was the guardian of the road which led from the deep, narrow sea loch to the scattered crofts and villages lying inland.
When the mists hung over the loch, blotting out the sharp mountains falling steeply towards its dark waters, this feeling of watchful loneliness increased. With the security of foot-thick stone walls around you, and a solid roof over your head, you could even take a peculiar pleasure in watching the swirling mists, for it was always pleasant to have your comfort and security emphasised. And if you had work to do the days of mist were welcome; for there was no temptation to go climbing or fishing or swimming, or to have a game of tennis, or to lie among the heather where the air was warm and sweet. Sweeter and cleaner, David thought, than anything he had ever felt around him, so that it became a conscious pleasure just to be alive, just to be able to breathe.
Today was a day of mist, but David found, to his great irritation, that he was thoroughly unsettled. Here he was standing at the window again, looking out at the half-formed shapes and ghostly outlines of a world which had disappeared and depended on human memory for its existence. This morning he had thought that the usual daily routine would occupy this mind of his, and that the attack of gloom which had descended on him, very much as the mist had descended on the loch, would clear.
But today an attack of restlessness had spread through the Lodge. Tea was over, yet the boys were certainly not doing much work, judging by the racket they were making in the music-room. George had settled philosophically in the more comfortable chair by the lighted fire in the library, with a pile of magazines on the small table at his elbow, although he actually had had enough good intentions to have a copy of The Greek Commonwealth lying open on his knees. And David had spent the last half hour reading and rereading the same page in Aristotle’s Politics, and then had risen from his chair and started walking round the library shelves.
He had picked out a book here and there, glanced at it, put it back into its place in its row. Well-filled rows, too, not only in number, but in choice. The library had been stocked by the yard, but adequately, thanks to the advice Lady Fenton-Stevens had taken from the Times Book Club. Guests marooned by the rain would find plenty to read. David had been surprised and delighted when he had first arrived, and had blessed Lady Fenton-Stevens’s advisers. It wasn’t too cruel to admit that she couldn’t have made this choice herself. She probably had not read ten books in the last ten years. She knew all about the books being published, of course—enough to make an amusing phrase in conversation. But to read them completely was a very different matter. “One is so frightfully busy, you know,” she had murmured vaguely to David last Christmas, just after she had returned from Paris and was about to set out for St Mor
itz.
There they were, all in their neat rows: Faulkner, Mann, Proust, Stendhal, Hemingway, Morgan, Romains... Practically virgin, too: David had read them with a paper-knife beside him, scanning a favourite page in those he knew, seizing upon those he had not been able to buy or borrow. It was comfortable, pleasant, to sit in the library beside the dying fire once George had trundled off to bed and the boys were also out of sight and hearing. It was more than pleasant: all the tutoring and coaching and justification for his existence were over for the day. He could spend a couple of hours here in peace, and take his choice in Stendhal or Dorothy Sayers, in Tolstoy or Wodehouse, before going up through the sleeping house to his own room. He hadn’t been reduced, like Dr. Johnson, to reading a History of Birmingham.
This afternoon, however, even the choice of books hadn’t helped him. Here he was, standing at this window, looking out at a wet, grey curtain. He must find something to read. He left the window and went back to the bookshelves. He pulled out A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and opened it at random. “Pride and hope and desire like crushed herbs in his heart sent up vapours of maddening incense before the eyes of his mind.” David grimaced and turned over to another page impatiently. It always was unfair, he reminded himself, to take a sentence out of context: the easy, the cheap, way to embarrass an author. Ah, here was what he was looking for... “Now I call that friendly, don’t you? Yes, I liked her today. A little or much? Don’t know. I liked her, and it seemed a new feeling to me. Then, in that case, all the rest, all that I thought I thought and all that I felt I felt, all the rest before now, in fact... O, give it up, old chap! Sleep it off!”... Yes, David thought savagely, sleep it off. He closed the book. Bitter advice, which Joyce himself refused merely by stating it. Only those who had never let themselves be possessed by thoughts and feelings, only those could sleep it off. He glanced over at George. George, now, could sleep off anything.
“I say, David, could you stop wandering round? Damned if I can concentrate,” George said.
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