If her own glance occasionally turned away from the earnestly discoursing young philosopher, it was in the direction of his brother. Fulke had so far not talked to her very much, and she was a little piqued by this. But at least neither was he talking to either of the other girls, who were at present engaged in some not very lively discussion of their own. He was conversing with Charles Gaston, if that could be called conversation when two men were sprawled side by side on their backs and gazing at the sky. But they did, thus disposed, seem to invite comparison. Dr Hurcomb’s new assistant hadn’t bothered to put on more than his shorts, which a little detached him from the now predominant tea-party aspect of the situation. What he presented to the still scarcely westering sun was a chest displaying small dark nipples with a light dusting of golden hair descending from between them to a tummy conventionally to be described as flat as a board. Fulke, on the other hand, was no longer on view as a torso, since he had resumed a fully clothed condition. But then Penelope had already been favoured with a leisured look at his physique, and she had to conclude that neither young man held any advantage over the other in this literally superficial regard.
But what did their features as indexes of character respectively reveal? She decided that they didn’t here much resemble one another. Gaston was probably by a few years the younger. Fulke’s features in full sunshine, and even in the sort of drowsy repose at present possessing them, suggested things that Gaston’s didn’t. Perhaps it was what people called the impress of experience. There were those little lines round the eyes. There was even a hint that at the temples his hair might be turning prematurely grey. And one could feel, too, that at any moment an unexpected motility, expressive perhaps of enjoyment or suffering, might overtake what were at the moment those contented and slightly parted lips. Gaston’s features told one less. But what they did somehow seem to speak of was a strong and settled mind. He was what they called a well-balanced man. If one thought in terms of a life’s journey with one or the other, Gaston might have the edge on Fulke at the humdrum level of reliability and stability.
These were perceptions and imaginings drawing the mind away from what the mere eye perceives. Indeed, if Penelope at this time found herself quite frequently thinking in particular about Fulke, it wasn’t, she suspected, much on the score of that immediate physical attraction which she and Dora had recently so sagely discussed. It was rather because Fulke was famous: the sole person of her acquaintance so far whom the world could be said to have heard of. So even a glance from him was flattering.
Confronting this picture of the matter, Penelope was disposed to accord herself a good mark for candid self-scrutiny. And she continued to glance across at Fulke from time to time, even while equally continuing to listen respectfully to Caspar’s sketch of his present intellectual position. Then a slight change in the configuration of the party took place. Charles Gaston, through sheer soaking in sunshine it may have been, appeared actually to have fallen asleep. Fulke was continuing to offer desultory remarks to the heavens. But presently, as if becoming aware that their only response was silence, he sat up and glanced down at his supine companion. He did this, it seemed to Penelope, with a curious intentness of regard – rather as if fearful that Gaston had fainted, or even departed this life with a highly dramatic abruptness. Then Fulke got swiftly to his feet, and with no further glance at the sleeping man walked over to join Dora and Sophie.
Fulke Ferneydale was touchy, Penelope thought, and had resented even his occasional remarks having assumed the function of a lullaby. And now she found that Caspar, too, had observed the incident – deep in speculative considerations though he had been.
‘I say!’ he said. ‘Fulke must have been boring that chap Gaston. Chattering to him about actresses, probably, and that sort of thing. And now Gaston’s woken up, and may be feeling himself rather abruptly deserted. Do you think I ought to go over and have a word with him myself?’
‘Yes, I do. I’ll join the others.’
‘As a matter of fact, Gaston is remarkably well-informed on some matters I’ve lately been thinking about quite a lot.’
‘Unlike me, Caspar.’
‘Penelope, I didn’t mean—’ Caspar broke off, quite surprisingly upset. ‘You see, I love talking to you,’ he said. ‘Even if it’s just my own stupid stuff, and you’re simply being polite about it.’
And before Penelope could frame any reply to this startling speech, Caspar Ferneydale had got up and hurried away.
In fact it took Penelope a minute or two to pull herself together and join Fulke and the other girls. Fulke appeared to have got round to teasing them about something she didn’t at first catch on to, but this in a properly good-natured way.
‘But you’re going to enjoy Somerville very much, Dora,’ she heard him say – and it was evident that he would now regard ‘Miss Quillinan’ as an unfriendly and formal manner of address. ‘It won’t be any sort of cloister, I agree. But you’ll have plenty of time to work like mad if you want to. And even the butterflies and socialites – if there are such females there any longer – will concur with your tutors in forming a high opinion of your deserts. It’s my guess that you’ll become Head Girl there too. As will Penelope, for that matter.’ Fulke was now aware of Penelope as having joined the group. ‘If, that’s to say, she decides to follow you along.’
‘Do you advise me to?’ Penelope asked – and discovered as she spoke quite a strong impulse to challenge Fulke from time to time. ‘If they at all thought of having me, that is.’
‘It’s a hard question,’ Fulke said humorously. ‘As a matter of fact, it’s a general conundrum I was having some chat with Charles Gaston about.’
‘Until he went to sleep on you?’ Dora asked suddenly. She seemed to have the same instinct to challenge Fulke as Penelope had. ‘We were just noticing that.’
‘Charles is earnest, I assure you, as well as somnolent. And he believes in looking ahead. Sophie, do you believe in looking ahead? Or do you stick to looking hopefully around you?’
This piece of mischief appeared to puzzle rather than offend Miss Dix, who actually swept the horizon briefly by way of reply. Sophie, Penelope thought, might be a socialite but couldn’t very well be called a butterfly, being distinctly on too robust a scale for any such comparison.
‘Careers,’ Fulke said, having received only silence. ‘Charles believes in careers. He says that if girls go to Oxford it should be to read Physiology and then Medicine. He says that women make better doctors than barristers – and that school-teaching is unthinkable, and the Army won’t have them except as curiosities.’
‘Does he regard marriage as a career?’ Dora asked.
‘We didn’t get round to that. Certainly I do. But one doesn’t have to go to Oxford in search of matrimony.’
‘Are there any statistics?’ Penelope asked. She had lately become aware of statistics as a mystery that in numerous fields increasingly commanded masculine attention. ‘On what does most frequently happen, I mean, to women who go to universities.’
‘They become secretaries.’
‘And sit typing things?’ Sophie asked. ‘I think that sounds quite horrid.’
‘Well, not exactly sitting in pools – as we’ve been doing this afternoon.’ It amused Fulke to produce mild incomprehension in Sophie Dix. ‘But they do follow up their Old French Philology or whatever with crash courses in that region. Big Business bosses – tycoons, as they now say – like to feel they have that sort of girl taking down their thoughts on scratch-pads just as they’d formerly taken down the pronouncements of Regius Professors and such like cattle in their lectures. They maintain, you see, that in important concerns like theirs a high value attaches to what they call trained minds – meaning some rather old-fashioned liberal education. But it’s at bottom a matter of social prestige. “I’m interested to hear that your daughter’s at Girton,” they say. “My secretary was a Girton girl.” ‘
‘How very dismal!’ Dora spoke as one having no
doubt about this.
‘Yes, indeed. Of course they do quite rationally need somebody guarding their door and answering their telephone who takes upper-class social relations more in her stride than perhaps they’ve been wholly bred up to themselves. But what has Oxford or Cambridge to do with that? Increasingly near to nothing at all. And the old-established chaps – the merchant-bankers and so forth – know it perfectly well. They like fillies out of their own stable on the whole – just as a matter of social ease, really. But they don’t give a hoot for degrees in Modern History or PPE. That’s why the gentry on whose fringes we respectfully move – the third baronets and the knights of the shires – tend increasingly to shove their surplus daughters straight into secretarial colleges.’
Miss Dix continued to look bewildered, but this time a little offended too. ‘Fringes’ (which in any case was markedly inaccurate) seemed to her a highly derogatory word. Dora looked as if she might fire up a little on the broader ground of feminism in general. But Penelope felt that she was in the presence of worldly wisdom, even if there was a hint in it of persuasions none too graciously expressed.
‘Do you have a secretary, Fulke?’ she asked. ‘And a door she has to sit like a dragon before?’
‘I had a siren for a time. But it didn’t do.’ Fulke, as sometimes happened with him, immediately looked as if he regretted this remark. ‘I get along very well on my own,’ he added. ‘There’s a chap called a theatrical agent who does this and that for me. And I’m not very constantly in demand, anyway. Particularly when I’ve got away from London, which I’m now intending to do for some time. I do occasionally think that, for a writer, there’s a lot to be said for having some small lurking place abroad. And I even have something on the horizon, as a matter of fact. It’s a very modest villa in France.’
Despite herself, Penelope was impressed by this suggestion of precocious affluence. She knew that one ought not to have too much regard for worldly things. But to be coming to command them through gifts of the imagination was surely a quality not to be despised. And her glance went once more from Fulke to his new acquaintance, Charles Gaston. Before Gaston, it was to be supposed, lay nothing more than an obscure if beneficent career as a country GP. So she was entitled to regard Fulke at least as the more interesting of these two young men. But yet again she felt – although without at all knowing why – that there was something unsatisfying in this conclusion.
Part Three
VIII
‘Who ambles time withal?’ Dora Quillinan asked in a tone of idle reminiscence. Dora was paying one of her visits to the vicarage. ‘Everybody seems to stay put at Mallows. It’s one of its charms. Does anybody new ever arrive – or anybody familiar ever go away?’
‘Dr Gaston – whom you probably remember – went away. He put in a spell on some sort of research in America. But admittedly he’s back again now.’
‘A rambler rather than an ambler.’
‘I suppose it’s my father with whom time may be said to amble. Although he can’t be called a priest that lacks Latin.’ Penelope could still recall Rosalind’s exchanges with Orlando, although not only school but also Oxford was now behind her. ‘He potters at his book. But his mind is turning a bit hazy, as you must have observed.’
‘So that he feels it, and it worries him?’
‘I don’t think so – or not a great deal. Caspar, who has all the good intentions in the world, sometimes gets him fidgety by trying to talk philosophy with him. He wants to create a feeling of their being on easy and equal terms about that sort of thing. But of course Daddy doesn’t keep up as Caspar does, and he doesn’t like admitting that he’s at sea. Caspar says there’s a certain irony in the particular aberrations that occasionally overtake him. Daddy’s book is to be about Time, you’ll remember: a kind of serious version of that silly dialogue in Shakespeare’s play. But what has happened to my father is that he keeps getting his own timing wrong. Sometimes it’s comical and sometimes it’s embarrassing. It was quite splendidly both last Sunday.’ As she said this, Penelope’s face lit up with mischief – which was something, Dora reflected, that it did less frequently than of old. ‘It was in his sermon.’
‘You don’t mean that he went on and on for hours?’
‘No, I don’t. Nor that he began it all over again as soon as he’d finished it. Perhaps that lies in the future. The Future, incidentally, troubles Daddy a good deal. He says it’s more baffling than the Past, which you can at least see diminishing in the distance. But where does the Future come from? He admits he hasn’t a clue.’
‘I call that very sensible of your father, Penelope. But tell me about last Sunday.’
‘He simply got into the pulpit for his sermon, and began as he usually does. He said, ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost – Amen.’ Then he crossed himself – and suddenly remembered something he’d forgotten to announce a few minutes before. So he said, “Through the customary kindness of Mr Ferneydale, the water-spaniel trials will take place in Mallows Park at two o’clock on Saturday afternoon”. Then he went on to announce his text. It happened to be the bit about the dogs getting the crumbs that fall from the Master’s table. Of course nobody laughed – not even the unfortunate children who are made to turn up and serve as a choir. I suppose they didn’t see the fun.’
Dora saw the fun – and found herself wondering what else she was coming to see during these occasional visits to Mr Rich’s home. Decidedly not yet among them was how Penelope had come to marry Caspar Ferneydale. She’d have been much less surprised had her friend married Fulke – although the result of that might have been disastrous as the achieved marriage was not. Caspar was undoubtedly a devoted and affectionate husband, and perhaps it didn’t at all matter that he hadn’t much got on. Nobody who much gets on is likely to settle down to domesticity in his father-in-law’s abode. And here the oddity was emphasised by Caspar’s own native ground being no farther off than over a stile or through a gate. Presumably the need to keep an eye on the increasingly eccentric Henry Rich was a factor in the arrangement, and Dora knew that there had been a certain amount of housekeeping chaos in the vicarage when Mrs Gibbins had suddenly dropped dead over her ancient kitchen stove. But only a temporary accommodation might have been expected to succeed upon that. Had the sole alternative appealing to Caspar been to maintain his bride under his own ample parental roof; and had Penelope dug in her heels against this? Dora had never ventured to inquire.
Financial considerations might have been involved. Caspar’s species of literary production plainly didn’t earn a bean, and every now and then there were rumours that the Ferneydale business concerns weren’t doing too well. Fulke Ferneydale must now, of course, be a rich rather than a merely prosperous man. But that would be beside the point, since it was unthinkable that Penelope would consent to being consistently helped out by a brother-in-law. And Fulke, for that matter, appeared to be wholly divorced from his family, his private life belonging to the same region of vague rumour as his father’s standing with his bank. What Dora did know was that Fulke was somewhere rather firmly lodged in a secret corner of Penelope’s mind.
Time ambles with others as well as philosophically insufficient clergymen. Did it a little amble, Dora wondered, with Penelope herself, oddly functioning as the lady of the vicarage while married to a papist doggedly speculative in print whenever he could command it? There had, Dora knew, been of necessity an undertaking that Caspar’s children would be brought up in the Catholic faith, and it had been much to old Mr Rich’s credit that his ecumenical sense had prompted him to concur in this. So far – and it was now a matter of several years – no children had appeared. Penelope was silent about the fact. But Dora herself – who was so decidedly attractive a young woman – remained unmarried, and there had been no talk about that either. The marriage they had a little talked about – because it had been so unexpected – was Fulke’s. And Dora was suddenly prompted to turn to this topic now. The two young women were
in the vicarage garden, and there was nobody in sight except (as once before) Tommy. But Tommy Elbrow was now a sturdy young man, with behind him a spell in the army which had a little broadened his horizons, but now back at Mallows, fully in charge of his former domain, and with a recently acquired wife and child of his own.
‘Time didn’t amble with your brother-in-law,’ Dora said. ‘I mean in the matrimonial way. Do you think that – to put it vulgarly – it was a shot-gun affair? Who wrote a novel called The Amazing Marriage?’
‘Meredith.’ Penelope had ended up by reading English at Oxford.
‘It was certainly that. That perfectly awful girl!’ Dora noted that an unexpected shadow had fallen over Penelope’s face. ‘You don’t mind my saying that about a relation of yours by marriage?’
‘Of course not. But I think you are unjust to Sophie. She isn’t clever, and it was never evident that she tried to mitigate the fact by any devotion to serious pursuits.’ It was as if Penelope was producing this piece of vicarage primness to give herself time to think. ‘It’s only that chief disparity between Fulke and herself that makes the marriage seem remarkable. And unpromising, too, no doubt. But sexually she was, and I suppose still is, very appealing indeed.’
‘Bitches with that must have been two-a-penny with Fulke. Why marry one?’
‘Sophie Dix may have held out. She was brought up with very conventional ideas, after all. And it does seem that a man can get so besotted with a woman that he’ll stand before an altar with her and say those tremendous things just to be able to tumble her into bed.’
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