Return I Dare Not

by Margaret Kennedy

  “Do get in, Adrian. What are you waiting for?”

  “Are there two cars?” asked Adrian dubiously. “Will there be room for everyone? I can take a cab quite easily.”

  He knew that there were two cars, but Aggie was sure to go in the other one, and he wanted to go with her. So did Corny. So did Hugo. His eye strayed towards the barrier. Philomena saw it and flashed angrily. For snobbery was a thing which she had always detested and despised. She was as little of a snob herself as it is possible for a person of taste and discrimination to be. But then she had always known that Adrian was a snob. She had never really liked him. He was not really a good critic. His friends’ books reminded him far too often of Voltaire. And his treatment of poor Betsy was quite abominable.

  Brightly she urged him to engage a taxi at once, before more people got out of the station. At least she would pay him out by forcing him to explain himself. But he merely said:

  “I’ll see if Corny will share it.”

  At this point their attention was called by the chauffeur to the second car. There was plenty of room for everybody.

  “Oh then,” cried Adrian adroitly, “I’ll stop Corny from getting a taxi.”

  Aggie herself came through the barrier and the question was settled without further debate.

  “Two cars,” said Aggie. “I see. I want Hugo to come with me. You and Adrian get into the other one, Corny.”

  Corny, grinning valiantly, did as he was told. Adrian followed him with a less good grace. Indeed, Gibbie was the only satisfied occupant of the middle-class car, for he knew that he would have more room for his legs where Aggie was not.

  Philomena, waiting for them, managed to look as aloof as a butterfly perched on a rose. She seemed a little surprised when they all got in, as if she had not been quite sure whether other people were coming or not. And Hugo, ravished as he was at being picked out by Aggie, could not help sighing when he looked at Philomena, so gentle and serene, like a flowery glade in the middle of Basingstoke. He wished that he might have changed places with Adrian or Corny or Gibbie. The dying poet in his heart groaned thirstily. For Aggie was a business rather than a pleasure, a career rather than a diversion. Even the memory of Caro, his Magnolia tree, looked a little concocted beside the nymph-like freshness of Philomena. He caught her eye and came close to her car while Aggie was haranguing the station master.

  “Well?” he murmured. “Have you been to Stonehenge?”

  He referred to a small joke that they had shared in Kew Gardens. For he had an excellent memory and always greeted an attractive woman with an allusion to some jest or confidence which had united them at their last meeting, thereby securing an immediate recognition of intimacy. So that he could keep a dozen irons in the fire at once, as long as he never mixed up these private passwords.

  Philomena gave him a leisurely smile. That was all right then. He remembered, even if he did not, as yet, take her seriously. He was bored with the idea of Aggie already. She drove off contentedly with her sulky and depressed companions. A taxi with Aggie’s maid and the luggage came after them, rattling through the streets of Basingstoke. But the second car, with Hugo and Aggie in it, dallied unaccountably in the station yard.

  “Why don’t we start?” demanded Aggie, two seconds after Hugo had taken his place beside her.

  Their chauffeur explained rather nervously. Yet another gentleman was expected by this train.

  “What?” exclaimed Hugo and Aggie in dismay. “Somebody else?”

  Corny would have been better than this. For the interloper must be a complete stranger. The chauffeur believed that his name was Usher.

  “Usher?” said Aggie, as though the word had been a little obscene. “Let him take a taxi. We can’t wait. We shall get sunstroke. We’ve been sitting here for an hour at least. I don’t suppose for a minute that he’s come by this train.”

  The man exchanged glances with his colleague. It was one of those crises which only ambassadors and domestic servants are expected to survive. How did Mr. Usher count as against Aggie? Was he too important to be left behind? The colleague nodded slightly. Nobody counted against Aggie.

  “Very good, my lady.”

  “Perhaps he’s gone already in a taxi,” said Hugo, by way of salving his own conscience. “I say! What’s this?”

  A gladstone bag with a striped P & O label had been suddenly thrust into the car on Aggie’s feet, and a large red man was climbing in after it.

  “Like the wooden horse being pushed into Troy,” thought Hugo, fascinated.

  Nobody who knew Laura could have believed that this was her new boy friend. Even the chauffeur had his doubts and interfered to demand if it was Mr. Usher.

  “It is,” said the stranger. “And if you’ll just move a little, Madam, I’ll put my bag where it won’t get in the way of your legs.”

  Aggie, dazed, did as she was told. The wooden horse folded himself up on the seat opposite to Hugo and the car started.

  Aggie was rather sorry, now, that she had brought Hugo with her. This newcomer stirred her to a languid curiosity. She tried to remember what it was that she had heard about him. He had discovered something and he was Laura’s belonging. Other people’s affairs were always rather dim to Aggie, but this one struck her as amusing because it was unexpected. Much cry and little wool had hitherto been the outstanding feature in Laura’s affairs. Incontinent only in conversation she was known to dismiss her admirers at the first unmistakable manifestation of carnal appetite. But this one looked as though he might be sent away five minutes after arrival and Aggie asked herself how much talk Laura was expecting to get out of it. For her own part she had never been more ready to commend Laura’s choice and as she looked him over with a wanton, but not unfriendly eye, she wished that she had known he was coming before.

  Ford Usher looked back at Aggie and told himself that she was a Society Woman. That disposed of her as neatly as if she had been a mosquito pinned down into one of his little specimen boxes. For though he had spent most of his life in malarial swamps, he knew a Society Woman when he met one, because he had seen pictures of them in those illustrated weeklies which abound in deserts and on frontiers. Also his mother, who had brought up seven children by writing a very humble kind of Gossip Column, had told him a good deal about these creatures. She said that they were all alike, but he was not so foolish as to believe her. Every species, as he well knew, has its subdivisions. For instance, he was certain that Laura Le Fanu must be quite different from all other Society Women. He would not be coming to Syranwood unless she were, or leaving his assistant at the Guthrie Institute to carry out an important dissection alone. So that he was not particularly interested in Aggie and would have preferred the Institute smell of pitch pine and pure alcohol to the gale of carnation which she was wafting about the car.

  “Have you ever been to Syranwood before?” began Hugo, who felt that the wooden horse must be helped a little.

  Ford looked at him for the tenth of a second and said:

  “No.”

  “Very hot day,” pursued Hugo. “This sort of heat is so much more trying than the tropics, don’t you think? Or don’t you?”

  “No.”

  Aggie giggled and Hugo gave it up. Ignoring the presence of the wooden horse he devoted himself to the business of entertaining her. With nervous rapidity he said several things which were much too good to be wasted at this point of the visit. Aggie, absorbed by the intriguing stranger, made no effort to appreciate them. He realised that he ought to study the art of saving himself up. These brilliances should have been reserved for an important moment, preferably the full publicity of the dinner table. Now he had tossed them away before a mixed audience in a station car, getting no real credit for them, nor could they be repeated later with any comfort in the presence of Aggie or Ford. Good things were not so easily come by that he could waste them like that. But he still had a lot to learn. Many of his best jokes were made under circumstances when any unscrupulous friend could
steal them. He was drawing recklessly upon that precious, irreplaceable little capital of personality which had got him out of the gulf. And every so often he had a premonitory shiver of fright when he realised that the balance was continually getting smaller and that nothing was coming in. Someday it would be all gone and then he would be a bore, living precariously on the remnants of a reputation, and at last They would find him out.

  But such fears, as he hastily reminded himself, were absurd. A great deal must really be coming in. This bogy of sterility was a mere consequence of temporary overstrain. His success had opened out vast new opportunities for experience. He was able to travel, to spend, to know a great variety of people, to sample fresh aspects of life. And it was sheer morbidity to look back upon the epoch of Joey and Squirrel as a period of comparative wealth. He could not really then have been getting more than he gave. And before that? Why did he keep reverting to those first days when he and everyone else had been so boringly and eternally occupied with the banal details of life, how to catch buses, how not to catch colds, and the price of parsnips? That was not life: it was merely existence. When daily bread had been secured only a fraction of soul and energy was left over for the finer sentiments. While at Syranwood, for instance, he would consort with people who had studied living itself as an art. And these must have more to give by way of exchange. Of course they would expect him to sing for his supper, but it was absurd to suppose that their fare was less nourishing than that afforded by the bus catchers. But they were more exhausting; perhaps because they demanded more.

  Unawares he yawned and was at once conscious that Ford Usher, sitting opposite, was observing him with a speculative and medical eye. Probably the fellow was hoping for a case of sleepy sickness. Perhaps it was a tsetse fly that he had discovered. Hugo remembered in a vague way certain headlines, little sketch maps of some outlandish place, and a row at a British Medical Conference. He never read that part of the newspaper very carefully, but it was impossible not to have gathered something of it. He searched his mind for details.

  “I think,” he said to Ford at last, “that I’ve been bitten by a culex pseudopictus.”

  Ford showed signs of interest and asked where. Hugo, with a glance at Aggie, said he thought it had been on his elbow. Ford explained that he meant where on the map.

  “Oh, in Venice.”

  “There aren’t any in Venice,” said Ford crossly.

  He decided that Hugo was not as ill as he looked; merely dissipated.

  They were among the downs, going up one of those long, straight roads between chalky banks that lift away to the top of a ridge. Hugo remembered that Syranwood lay on the other side of these green walls, in a little cup filled with beech woods and sleepy hay fields. He had never stayed there, but once, some years ago, when he was merely a promising young man, he had been taken to lunch there by some friends. It was his first stately home and he had been very shy, also disappointed because it was not Tudor or filled with oak beams and minstrels’ galleries, but white and classic—a square box with flanking wings, a pillared portico and a flat, balustraded roof. He had not dared to ask for the salt and his hostess seemed to think that he was some kind of colonial. But he had improved since then.

  Up on the skyline of Chawton Beacon a string of young horses from some training stables spread out like a frieze. He had time to think that they were beautiful before calling Aggie’s attention to them. But the thought of beauty was exasperating, like an itching spot between his shoulder blades that he could not scratch. It could give him no happiness, only torment. All the time, while he was driving and talking, hints of beauty came to oppress him. He saw, he could not help seeing, the shadow of cloud on the hillsides. His eye caught a couple of haystacks huddled together just where the grassy down and the ploughland met. All round him there was space, design and rhythm, but he was shut away from the meaning of it, and he had come to know that the promise of these things was derision. He would stop and think:

  “Horses … grass … what was it I wanted to … what did those horses make me think I was going to …? Nothing. Nice to look at. But nothing more than just what they are. Horses. They don’t mean anything else. They aren’t there to remind me of anything. There is no other life.”

  He could not remember a time when he had not been maddened by this sense of getting messages from some other life which he seemed to be living simultaneously with the one he knew. A delusion of immense importance hung about these hints. But he had been cheated so often that he had learnt to be wary, and, having made Aggie look at the horses, he praised the extreme competence of a certain racing play then running in London.

  “Are you going to read me your new play?” asked Aggie, whose mind had been diverted to the drama. “I suppose it’s terribly clever.”

  Hugo assured her that it was. He would adore to read it to her if it would not bore her too terribly. Her opinion would be invaluable. And his orchestra executed a flourish because now he would be able to go back to London and say, quite casually, that Aggie did not like the curtain of the second act. The ability to say such things would be a valuable stimulant and might help him to throw off this idea that his new play was filth, tripe, tossed off in a transport of boredom and fatigue, like one gigantic yawn. Even Ford Usher was looking impressed. At the mention of Hugo’s play he had pricked up his ears, and after a pause for recollection he announced:

  “You’re Pott.”

  Hugo sketched that deprecating little gesture which he employed on these occasions, as though he might almost be apologising for being Pott, and laughing at himself for his ridiculous fame. He quite realised that on the Outposts of the Empire it is not always easy to know what celebrities look like.

  “I didn’t recognise you,” said Ford amiably.

  Hugo thought that he was talking about photographs. He did not realise that they had met before, in the house of Ford’s mother who held literary salons on Sunday evenings. For it was very long ago and Mrs. Usher was not the sort of Gossip Writer with whom he now forgathered. Nor had he been to her house more than once. The first occasion, when, incidentally, he had met Joey, was the last. It smelt too much. The cakes were too stale and the women too shrill even for the genial Hugo. For once in his career some instinct had warned him not to become entangled and he never went again. He had no idea that he was still one of her protégés, that she had picked him up, encouraged, and pulled strings for him, and that callow young writers were still inveigled to her house on Sunday evenings by the suggestion that Hugo Pott might drop in. He only remembered that incredible old woman and her parties as a successful joke in the Joey circle. He used to dress up in a satin frock and a black wig and do Mrs. Usher at a party.

  “I said to Henry James, now my dear man, I said, be sensible … just take the hairpins out of the coffee, please Mamselle, before you pour it out … poor Edmund Gosse came round to me in a great state about it … my daughter, Mrs. Hughes Price … my son the medical …”

  Ford was, in fact, ‘my son, the medical.’ But in those days he had been a gangling, half-grown youth and he had changed a good deal. He said nothing further to remind Hugo, and they sped on, over the empty spaces of sky and grass to where the road dipped down again.

  The tower of Ullmer church stuck up among the beech trees and Syranwood showed for a moment a white shimmer of walls and a flash of windows. As they curved downwards they had a glimpse of the long, stately front of it, and the smooth lawns, and a queer jumble of stables and farm roofs crowding up behind it. Over on the far side of the valley, above the young plantations which clothed the hills, a chalky track led up to the downs again, and as Ford caught sight of it his face grew very wooden indeed, for he had been on that path before and the memory devoured him with violent emotion. He wished that he had not come on this wild-goose chase. It was no good.

  And to Hugo it seemed that, instead of returning to Syranwood, he was leaving it for ever. All its beauty hung distinctly in the desolation and regret of his mind
, like a reflection in deep water. He reached down to it, groped for it. The image shivered and vanished. Once more he was cheated.

  Aggie said:

  “I like Syranwood. It’s so terribly unnatural, don’t you think?”

  Which was quite true. Hugo realised that his first, untutored impulse of disapproval had been right. The place was beautiful but exotic. It belonged as little to the English countryside as did its late proprietor, Otho Rivaz, whose money came from some mysterious source in Liberia and who might himself have walked out of Baghdad. It was said that the Rivaz family had been respectable solicitors in Leicestershire and that Otho had been educated at Rugby and Cambridge, but nobody knew for certain whether this was true or how he came to be so rich at a comparatively early age. He spent most of his life in undiscovered continents shooting lions and tigers, and when in England he hunted the fox. But he bought pictures, knew Manet from Monet at a time when few Englishmen had heard of either, and dined everywhere. Not that he looked un-British: he had the bluff heartiness of an eighteenth-century squire, but he managed to combine it with the mysterious dignity of some Eastern potentate.

  Sometime in the ’eighties he bought Syranwood, stamped it with something of his own mystery and installed in it a wife as enigmatic as himself. Lady Geraldine was the daughter of a bankrupt Irish peer and had been brought up amid the splendour and squalor of a ruined castle in County Donegal. Rumour said that she had never learnt to read until after she was married, but this was not true, for she annoyed Otho on the honeymoon by reading in bed. London had never seen her till she appeared as a bride and her beauty startled the civilised world. Nor did it ever see very much of her again, for Otho soon removed her to Syranwood where she remained for the rest of her life, bearing children and entertaining house parties. His frequent absences did not distress her and, if half the stories told were true, she consoled herself repeatedly. But nobody, again, knew for certain. None of the county dowagers could quite compute the dates of Otho’s departures or balance them against the arrival of babies, nor was anybody actually named as having been her lover. She had no intimate friends, she was discreet, and she worked hard. She did all that a woman in such a position ought to have done. Her alibi, as Corny once remarked, had always been a Church bazaar.