Four-Part Setting

by Ann Bridge

  With a detachment made possible by this acceptance, Anastasia had watched the marriage take place, foreseeing all its possibilities of failure and its chances of success. It had very nearly been in Rose to succeed—she had the wherewithal. The power of her beauty, her quite unfailing charm, her pliancy and natural sweetness—these were the things on which she should have leant; these were what, left to do their own work, would have soothed the irritability of Charles Pelham’s restless intelligence, lulled his monstrous mental arrogance, and that formidable sensitiveness to every phase of feeling in those around him, which could issue either in the most exquisite sympathy Anastasia had ever known, or in the most cruel and remorseless indifference. Rose’s natural intelligence, too, though untrained, was quite good enough (especially when supported by these powerful weapons) to have met any demands that he was likely to make on it. And she should have trusted more in his desperate passion for her, in his need of simple tenderness, of easiness, in the relationship; she should have understood that his chief requirement was simply an unfailing well of gentleness at which to assuage his proud and angry spirit. She never saw—perhaps she was too young to see—how much she had done for him, how great and novel a thing, in merely bringing him to this surrender, making him aware of this need. And so she failed to supply it. It was not for lack of trying; she tried hard enough; if anything she tried too hard. But she tried in the wrong way. Dazzled by his mind—as well she might be, Anastasia admitted—Rose had put her intelligence in the forefront of her array; she had relied on that, she had argued, she had stood up for herself; she had been afraid, her cousin guessed, of a complete surrender to his devouring and demanding love, afraid perhaps of her own possible response. And she was conventionally-minded, Rose—partly from youth and inexperience; she had her little amateurish ideas about marriage and love, and she wanted to put them into practice; to be herself—fatal wish!—and in her own way.

  Anyhow, she had failed; they had both failed. (Anastasia was unbiased enough to recognise Charles’s responsibility too.) Somehow or other the wells had been sealed, the deepest thirst left unquenched; and though there had been moments of happiness, pain and friction had come to predominate. While they had remained in England Anastasia had done her best to help Rose to make a job of it. Then the regiment had gone to Egypt, and the Pelhams with it; the old Lydiards had thed, and with Laurence behind his grille, the obvious thing was for Anastasia to join Antony, who had a job in the Posts in Peking. Since then she had seen nothing of either Rose or Charles, till Rose arrived in China a few weeks ago. They had written, of course; she knew that Rose’s baby, passionately desired by both of them, and as passionately loved when it came, had died when it was eighteen months old; she still kept, though she could never bear to look at it, Charles’s letter announcing the child’s death—the bleak cold accents of complete and angry despair in that letter had for the first time turned her sympathy spontaneously to Rose as against Charles. She suddenly realised what it must have been like, at such a time, to live with that coldness of anger, for a creature of Rose’s expansiveness. And when Rose wrote, nearly a year later, saying, without any other explanation, that she needed a change and proposed to travel, and thought, after a short visit to England, of coming to China, the old protective affection sprang up in Anastasia with fresh force, and she wrote eagerly and warmly, urging her cousin to come to Peking. She knew Rose well enough to give her credit for not leaving Charles unless things were pretty well impossible; and the irreconcilable misery of that letter had shown her how impossible they might be. When Rose came, she would learn what was wrong.

  But she had not learned as much as she expected. Rose had come, as affectionate as ever, and perhaps more beautiful, with a sort of lacquer of cosmopolitan finish on her hair and clothes, and all her old eagerness for gaiety and fun. She had refused to stay with them in Peking, settling down instead in the Wagons-Lits Hotel—so as not to be an incubus, she said; but she was in and out of the house all day long, and when they came to Pei-t’ai-ho, she consented to share their bungalow. There was a renewal, apparently complete, of intimacy and ease between the three of them; Anastasia ungrudgingly admitted that the fresh companionship seemed to be doing Antony good, and she herself enjoyed it enormously. But about Egypt and Charles, Rose was very close. On the second day, in Peking, when Antony was out, she had chosen a moment, sitting under the p’eng in the hot courtyard, to say—“You’ll be wanting to know why I’m here, Asta, and not with Charles. After the baby——” she paused. “He minded that quite frightfully, and I couldn’t help him. It seems odd, when I minded so much”—her voice had wavered—“myself. Anyhow I suppose he had to have something to distract him, and he—he rather took up with someone else. And I just couldn’t bear to be there then. So I came away. That’s all. Don’t let’s talk about it yet, please, Asta.” And she had arisen, as if to preclude the possibility of further talk, and walked out of the shadow of the p’eng to the foolish little goldfish pond, and stood there hatless, regarding the goggle-eyed fish. “What fantastic tails they have!” she called out presently, “they can’t be any use to them, they move about so little. What are they for, Asta? Will Antony know?”

  And that was all. Anastasia had left it at that, hoping that in time Rose would talk. But so far nothing had happened. And now there was this business beginning with Henry. What was Rose up to?—Anastasia asked herself—she was almost as much at a loss as Captain Hargreaves. She too had noticed their sudden growth of intimacy after the walk in the rain, and a number of little things subsequently. And here was Madame di Porto Fino, this morning, being almost openly arch about them.

  At this point Anastasia put down the parasol of painted oiled paper that she had been carrying, turned, and tossed it into the ricksha. She had left the main road now, and the sandy track, leading slightly uphill, was pleasantly shady. A moment or two more brought her to her own gate. The ricksha followed her through it, and drew up before the house. The boy, clad in white, appeared and took the parcels; the coolie pulled the ricksha over into a patch of shade, sat down, drew a partly-smoked Lucky Strike cigarette from behind his ear, lit it, and composed himself to wait. Anastasia walked through the small hall, which also served as a dining-room in bad weather, through the long, rather sparsely-furnished sitting-room which occupied the middle of the seaward side of the house, and out onto the verandah beyond. This ran the whole length of the bungalow; a dining-table stood at one end; rush chairs with cushions, a bridge-table and a gramophone occupied the centre—the further end was littered with tennis-racquets, a fishing-rod and other sporting gear. Out beyond the white painted railings lay the sea, blue and calm at the foot of the bluff. Here, as Anastasia expected, she found her brother. He was sitting at the dining-table, which was strewn with sheets of manuscript music; humming to himself, scribbling down a few notes, and humming again. She did not interrupt him, but threw off her hat, sat down in one of the rush chairs, and lit a cigarette. A black spaniel rose from beside Lydiard’s feet, walked over to her, and laid its head yearningly against her knee. After a moment or two more of humming and scribbling Antony laid down his pen, crumpled a piece of paper into a ball, threw it aside, and looked up.

  “Hullo,” he said.

  “How are you getting on?” she asked.

  “Badly. Can’t make it go this morning.”

  “Can’t you? What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, flying too high, I suppose. You see”—he turned fully towards her on his chair—“I should like to get an enharmonic change in the third line, to give a surprising and new tilt”—he spread his thin hand sideways in a delicate gesture—“to the melody; but I’ve got to lead the bass and the mean parts back to roost for the final Grand Amen, and I can’t see yet how to do that without awkwardness.”

  Anastasia hummed—with her a sign of thought rather than inattention. “You want to do more than do it without awkwardness, you want to do it gracefully,” she eventually observed.

  “I know. I
nevitably, if possible. Well, I can’t—or not at the moment, anyhow.” He got up, walked over towards her, and sat on the verandah rail, swinging his foot; when he walked one could see that he was very slightly lame—a shrapnel wound had permanently stiffened one instep and ankle.

  “Rose gone to Madame di Porto Fino’s?” Anastasia asked.

  “She’s gone bathing somewhere. H.H. came for her, and they went off—not long ago.”

  “It was Madame di Porto Fino’s.”

  “Oh, was it? I didn’t pay attention.”

  Anastasia leaned her head back and blew smoke into the air. “Old Mother P.F. is paying attention,” she said.

  “What to?”

  “Rose and Henry—she started being funny about them just now, down in the town.”

  “Does that matter?” Antony asked.

  “Perhaps not. All the same, I wish I knew what Rose was after.”

  “Henry is after Rose, if that helps you,” said her brother.

  Anastasia laughed rather unwillingly. “It doesn’t. Henry is always after somebody. But Ant, apart from the fact that it’s silly of her to start a lot of talk, just now, what is the point of her starting this flirtation with Henry, if she still cares about Charles?”

  “Does she still care about Charles?”

  “I don’t know. She was wretched about him when she came. Don’t be obstructive, Ant—tell me what you think.”

  Thus appealed to, Antony also lit a cigarette.

  “Honestly, I probably know much less about her state of mind than you,” he said. “I can only guess at it. Henry is plain sailing, of course—he’s quite simply scalped, as he would say.”

  Anastasia acknowledged this reference to Henry’s well-known vocabulary with a faint smile.

  “Yes, but why worry about Henry?” she asked a little impatiently. “He’s always being scalped. It’s his own fault—he will chase women so.”

  “He comes into it,” said Antony reasonably.

  “Yes—but he doesn’t matter. He can look after himself, in his own futile way.”

  “Yes, Rose does matter most—H.H. has a way of simplifying things for himself.” He paused, and then said in a different tone, equally detached but now quite without amusement—“Whether she cares about Charles any more or not, she certainly did care about him; and since he’s apparently turned her down for someone else, I can imagine her feeling that she could do with a boy-friend herself, just to keep her end up.”

  Anastasia pushed her hand up under her hair at the back, combing her fingers through it, and letting the dark mass drop again—a gesture that was usually an accompaniment to thought, with her.

  “Yes—I suppose she might,” she said doubtfully.

  “Obviously she would,” her brother answered. He looked a little amusedly at her. “Of course you’d rather she’d run off in a state of indignant chastity, wouldn’t you?”

  “I think I should, really,” she admitted.

  “It wouldn’t be nearly so human—nor so much like Rose.”

  “Oh, do you think that?”

  “Obviously I think that. Do you remember her before she married?”

  “She had troops of swains then, but I never thought her particularly one for the boys,” Anastasia said meditatively.

  “People who aren’t potentially ones for the boys don’t have troops of swains,” Antony pronounced.

  “All the same, I think it’s rather odd,” Anastasia pursued, pushing up her hair again. “She put such a lot into her marriage.”

  “I wonder how much, actually, there was to put then,” Antony said.

  “She put all she’d got, anyhow, and that is quite a lot,” his sister replied crisply.

  “Yes, that’s true enough,” Antony agreed. “You never found out why it went wrong, did you?”

  “No—only what I told you. She’s never spoken of it again.”

  “Funny,” he said.

  At this point Wang, the boy, appeared with the Peking and Tientsin Times; he sidled round among the furniture, in his white coat, with the peculiar silent neat-footedness of Chinese servants, and placed it on the table. Lydiard leant forward, took it, and proceeded to glance through it. Anastasia took up her embroidery—it was her way of making it clear that she didn’t want the paper first. “Any news?” she asked presently.

  “What? No. Oh, here’s an article by Hillier on Peking.”

  “I should have thought he was too high-hat to contribute to the P. and T.T.,” said Anastasia.

  “He’ll get the price of a round of drinks for it.” He read on, and giggled.

  “Is it any good?”

  “Fairly funny.”

  “Let’s see”—she rose and looked over his shoulder, putting up a lorgnette to read through. “Yes, it’s quite acute, but a little cheap, don’t you think?” she said when she had finished, sitting down again.

  “Oh, Roy has to be clever, or his own self-respect suffers—and he has to be funny, it’s what his publishers pay him for,” Antony said. “He suffered even at Winchester from that urge towards smartness, and it hasn’t diminished.”

  “Did you see him before you came away?”

  “No—he was still debunking Shanghai. He wrote to me. We shall see him when we get back—he’s stopping for a couple of months.”

  “We shan’t see much of him if we go straight off to Por Hua.”

  “We shall see quite enough,” said Antony. “A little of Roy goes a long way—or did.”

  “Yes—he used to be a most tiresome young man. Though I always felt there was something rather engaging about him, or could have been.”

  “ ‘Could have been’ has it. He could be delightful if he could ever stop being one smarter than other people,” Antony said, rather impatiently. “He’s the prisoner of his own cleverness—it’s walls and bars between him and real life.”

  But Anastasia’s mind had gone off to something else. “Let’s go and bathe,” she said, “it’s getting late.” That was not what she had in mind, but she had a curious way of introducing an important subject under cover of an unimportant one. When her brother had put down the paper she asked casually—“Have you thought any more about inviting Rose to come with us to Por Hua?”

  “I hadn’t, no. But I don’t really see how we can avoid it, do you? Besides, I think she’d enjoy it immensely. In any case,” he added a little maliciously, “I’m sure Henry will.”

  Chapter Three

  When the Lydiards got back from their bathe, followed by a boy carrying their towels, they found Captain Hargreaves on the verandah, mixing himself a cocktail at the tray which stood ready.

  “I’ve come to lunch, Asta,” he announced. “That all right? Mrs. P. seemed to think I might.”

  “Perfectly all right. Have you told Wang?”

  “Mrs. P. did.”

  Anastasia walked round onto the eastern end of the verandah, beyond the dining-table, and through the french windows into her room; in the little bathing-cabinet beyond, where the amah was waiting with cans of water beside a sitz-bath, she threw off her bath-robe and bathing-dress, and sponged herself in cold water; it was so hot that the water was tepid, and though it was the amah who rubbed her down and powdered her shoulders, there were fine beads of perspiration on her forehead by the time she had worked her short thick body into a chemise and went back into her room. There she put on a loose silk kimono and a pair of espadrilles, ran the comb through her damp hair, and went out onto the verandah again. Since one had anyhow to undress for the siesta afterwards, it was the custom at Pei-t’ai-ho to lunch in negligees in one’s own house—and because of the great heat, it was not usual to go out to luncheon. On the verandah Mrs. Pelham was now sitting, also in a kimono, drinking a cocktail; Li, the Number Two boy, a stout awkward creature, stood with the cloth over his arm and his hands full of napkins, gazing in comic dismay at the table, which was still strewn with Antony’s music.

  Anastasia had a great gift, which strangers sometimes found disc
oncerting, for entering a room without speech. She crossed the verandah now, humming, poured herself out a cocktail, sipped it, and glanced vaguely round—she noticed Li, set down her cocktail, and going over to the table started sorting the sheets of music and clipping them together; then she bunched them all together on the floor under a broken glazed tile, and still humming, still without addressing either Rose or Hargreaves, she resumed her cocktail. Li, grinning with relief, began to lay the table. Lydiard emerged from his room at the further end of the verandah, which gave onto what Hargreaves called the Sports Equipment Department, where the rods and racquets lay, wearing a white cotton kimono covered with red storks; he came limping over to the others, took a cocktail and also sat down. Suddenly he noticed Li setting the table, and jumped up, crying—“My God, Asta, what’s that fool done with my music?”

  “It’s all right—I put it on the floor—there, under the tile,” Anastasia soothed him.

  At lunch Lydiard asked Hargreaves if he had seen Hillier’s article in the Peking and Tientsin Times. Hargreaves had not. “Is he out here now?” Rose Pelham asked, rather surprised.

  “Yes—in Peking. Do you know him?” Antony asked.

  “No—I should like to meet him.”

  Hargreaves turned to her, with a certain militancy of manner. “Do you admire his books, Mrs. P.?”

  “Yes—I think they’re frightfully amusing,” she said. “Don’t you?”

  “Can’t say I care about the fellow much myself, no,” said Hargreaves; “he’s so damned superior. Don’t know him, of course—I mean his books.”