by Ursula Bloom
‘It hurts my eyes,’ she said, and fell back on to the little bed again. But it was not her eyes that it hurt really, but her heart.
It was something that she couldn’t explain.
9
They bought the Buckingham cottage that next spring.
Dinah had liked the idea of a country place from the first moment that Max had mentioned it. One day every week they went into the country searching for a suitable cottage. They were lured out by the wiles of unscrupulous estate agents who fed them with fascinating brochures, or by the carefully worded advertisements in untruthful papers. They went through a series of bitter disappointments.
There was the black-and-white farm which was exactly what they wanted, and which, by a trivial accident, they discovered backed on to the sewage farm. The Tudor cottage inconveniently placed beside a wailing sawmill. There were places with attractive names which made them burn to get out to visit them; innumerable Jasmine Cottages; The Old Thatch; and one called The Old Forge, which they found had undoubtedly been built in the days when Queen Victoria was doing her worst by English architecture, and was merely on the site of a departed forge, but otherwise had nothing to do with it.
One March afternoon, returning to London thoroughly disheartened, they turned the corner of a Buckinghamshire village and saw the cottage standing back from the road, with its desultory notice-board ‘For sale’ stuck rakishly into the hedge. The place was dropping to bits. The wispy thatch was serving as a nesting place for birds. The orchard which stretched before the house was neglected, and had grown ragged.
‘Look,’ she cried excitedly, ‘stop the car! That’s our cottage!’
They got out and went into the garden where the frost lay in white patches, and there was a late snow on the roof which gave it a piebald look. They got the key from an adjacent village shop, and went inside. There were two low sitting-rooms with big ingles and tiled floors, and above them three bedrooms. Outside there had been built on a garage and a room that would do for Lisa, joined to the house by a little corridor. The garden itself was long and thin, ending in a walled-in section where, long ago, vegetables had been grown, but which was now as unkempt as the rest of the place.
‘There is no mistake about it, this is our cottage,’ said Max.
‘I saw it,’ she cried, her eyes shining, and she danced on the frosty grass. ‘It is just asking us to buy it, isn’t it?’
When they got back to Hampstead they rang up the agent, who adopted the attitude of most agents; apparently he did not care whether he sold it or not. There was some prolonged argument, for the owner was abroad, but ultimately the cottage passed into their hands, and from that moment all their interest centred in it. A new thatch went on to the rafters. The inside was dried out with big fires, for it had suffered from leaking walls, and a roof which was no pretence at a roof at all. The garden was dug over, and laid out after a great deal of enjoyable planning, the well was thatched to match the roof, the yew hedge clipped into some semblance of order. With the late spring and the early summer there came the joy of furnishing.
‘Let’s do it our own way, not go to a shop and order things,’ she begged Max, ‘but as you suggested; junk shops, and the Caledonian Market, and everything a real treasure.’
They went to the Caledonian Market, and poked about among the curios there. They went to antique shops in the King’s Road, Chelsea, some kept by bearded gentlemen ‒ usually artists ‒ who, having failed in the creative business, now sold other people’s white elephants. Some kept by business-like little men, who wanted absurdly high prices for inferior goods.
They bought only when they liked the objects. Dinah had a childish idea that furniture was alive, and some of it wanted to become her particular property. She would say, ‘Look, Max, that little table; it wants to be our little table,’ as though it had really told her.
‘All right,’ he would say, ‘I suppose we’ve got to have it.’ But he loved her for her funny little ways.
One by one their belongings came down to Buckinghamshire, and the cottage grew dignified, no longer an old wreck of a place, but proud amongst the cool green trees of summer. Sheffield plate candlesticks shone in gloomy corners; there was the superb flow of warm mahogany and oak; the sheen of blue china and the spinning wheel, a very great treasure, that, nearly missed in Church Street, Kensington; an old wayward spinning wheel, half broken and requiring a great deal of seccotine work.
Dinah took her mother down there for one week-end because she longed to show the place to someone; this was a mistake, for Mrs. Treeves was in a vague mood, and showed no coherent interest.
‘But we did it ourselves, everything. We planned every inch of it,’ said Dinah enthusiastically.
‘Well, well, well; it must have given you a lot of trouble, to be sure,’ said Mrs. Treeves calmly. She was not impressed.
Dinah said, ‘Send me down a plant of lilac and some jasmine from Dukeleys. It’s funny, but I want that jasmine to be here, and the lilac too. I’ve smelt them all my life, and I want to go on smelling them.’
‘I’ll ask your father, but he never likes the thingummies being moved. Which did you say you wanted?’
‘Jasmine and lilac.’
‘They say if you transplant a plant you have known all your life it brings trouble or something or other with it,’ she said vaguely.
‘You’re a pessimist. I wouldn’t believe a word of it.’
But the lilacs came and were planted close to the terrace so that she could see them from the corner of the sitting-room window when the spring came. The jasmine she set herself over the porch, where an old ship’s bell hung, with a piece of ragged rope to pull it by. They had bought it together from a junk shop in Clapham, and the man had thought he would never sell it; after all, he had told them, it wasn’t everybody who wanted a ship’s bell! He had laughed to see them taking it away, and when she had looked back to wave to him, he was still laughing.
There was shooting to be got, and Max hired several acres; there was fishing in the river, too. They were less and less at Hampstead, because now their interests centred round this place. Dinah did not know when she had been happier.
10
In spite of the prophecies of Aunt Lydia, her marriage was successful. Her aunt and uncle came to stay with her, and Aunt Lydia was sensible enough to admit that she had made a mistake.
‘I never thought that you’d be happy like this,’ she said.
‘Yet I told you that I was the type to become an old man’s darling.’
‘I know, but girls say all sorts of things they don’t mean. I once thought I was the type to become an officer’s lady. I wasn’t. I’m far better off as a business man’s woman.’
They liked the village, and Uncle Kenneth went to the Four Feathers, which was just across the road, and very convenient because Mrs. Wilkes the proprietress sold all sorts of things at all sorts of hours, and was most obliging. Far too obliging to Uncle Kenneth, because he came home in that state of deportment covered by Aunt Lydia as, ‘The darling’s tiddly again; dear me, what a life!’
It never worried her more than that.
Max accepted all this, he was too old to become easily annoyed at anything of that kind. If he had been younger he might have made a scene, as Dinah knew. There were lots of advantages in marrying an older man, she told herself. Aunt Lydia agreed with that.
‘They’re more placid of course, had their life, I suppose. What you lose on the swings you gain on the roundabouts. It all depends whether you like swings.’
Then Dinah met Piers.
It was life’s idea of a joke. Just when she was so sure, so confident that she had complete control of herself, she found that she had no control whatsoever. It was merely that this marriage of hers had been something like an epoch at a finishing school. It wasn’t love. It wasn’t marriage. There was another form of love, something passionately demanding, which, coming into her life, could sweep her along in a crazy tide and overwhelm he
r. She had been so sure of something that nobody can be sure about.
It was Max who brought Piers into the cottage to see Dinah. Piers had had a bad appendix taken out at the naval hospital at Haslar; then he had the misfortune to get a motor accident on the top of it, which had accounted for a couple of months’ leave. He had come to stay at the rectory with the Stephens, and he was finding it extremely dull. They had good hearts, but were entirely country-minded, and Piers could not understand them.
The first time that Dinah saw him, she recognised the attraction of youth, and it set her panicking. Until then she had been so confident of her feelings for Max; she had thought that the four years of their marriage was an immense time, when suddenly she changed. Perhaps it was that until this moment she had been a child, had thought as a child, and consequently had lived by a child’s standards. Now she was looking into the sharply cut face of a man who could make her feel all those emotions that she had never felt for Max. It was frightening.
She was horrified at the possibilities of life, then decided that it was so much nonsense; she behaved like an ostrich sticking its silly head in the sand, and refusing to countenance the truth.
‘Like him?’ asked Max later, when Piers had gone back to the dull little rectory.
‘He’s all right.’
‘He’s young, and lonely, and I don’t think too happy at the Stephens’. Be nice to him, my dear, he ought to be a pleasant companion for you.’
Idiot! she thought. Surely Max is old enough to recognise the danger of his youth? Because at this moment she had grown up. ‘I don’t like young men,’ she said.
‘All right. Only it sounds hard, he is such a very nice fellow.’
‘I didn’t mean to be unkind, it is just that I like older people better.’
‘You could never be unkind, you dear kid. Piers has had a rotten time with his appendix and his accident, and the Stephens are just relatives, which is never the way to enjoy a holiday. He would appreciate a little society.’
She stared at him with mutinous eyes; she could not go to him and say, ‘I know what you mean, but don’t you see that it might be dangerous? Piers is the sort of man that I could fall in love with, and I don’t want to give myself that chance.’ Aloud she said, ‘I’ll do my best.’
Later she thought she had been silly; there was no need to fall in love with a man if she made up her mind that she wouldn’t. So she went out with Piers, on shopping expeditions into Aylesbury, and on picnics. Max came with them. Sometimes he left them alone. Mr. and Mrs. Stephens did not go out much, and their daughter Muriel was in London studying music, which local opinion considered she would do better to leave alone. Once he asked her to a dance.
‘You can’t want me to come?’ said Dinah, her heart thumping ridiculously.
‘If you don’t come, I can’t go. What’s the good of a dance without a partner?’
‘But I haven’t danced for ages.’
‘Anyway, I’m asking you.’
She heard herself saying, ‘Anyway, I accept.’ Max was glad when he heard about it. However, when she got to the dance it was not the success that she had hoped for. All the time she kept making absurd comparisons. Piers’ cheek which still held the freshness of youth and was unwrinkled, and Max’s lines which were legion. Piers’ thick dark hair had no sign of a tonsure beginning to show itself on the thinning crown; his hands were unmottled. Sharply and cruelly these comparisons struck and she could not escape them. Once recognised, she could not be blind to them any longer. The ostrich might still be trying to hide its stupid head, but all the sand had blown away. She tried to banish the nonsensical thoughts, telling herself that if she did not dwell on them, she could in time dismiss them.
This did not work any more.
11
It happened that night when they went to a dance at the road house St. Albans way. Max had intended to go with them, but at the last moment his asthma was threatening, and in consequence he stayed at home. He insisted that they should go, because he would not spoil their pleasure, so they went to please him.
Coming home, Piers stopped the car on the crest of the hill, with the stars in a fanciful sky, and the abbey against it, silhouetted in black velvet. It reminded Dinah of St. John’s in Valletta when they had passed the entrance to the Grand Harbour; she did not know why, for the abbey was squat and in figure like a brooding hen, whilst St. John’s was gaunt, all belfries and turrets.
The car stopping, he turned off the engine. ‘This can’t go on,’ said Piers.
She could not pretend that she did not know what he was talking about; she had known ever since he had come to stay at the Stephens’. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I suppose you’re right. It can’t go on.’
‘You know perfectly well that I fell in love with you the first moment we met, and I believe that you’ve fallen in love with me?’
‘We mustn’t say these things; it isn’t fair. Please forget it.’
‘People don’t forget things like this. Grow up, Dinah, and face it. What are you going to do about it? Why did you throw yourself away on a man old enough to be your grandfather?’
‘Max is a dear. He has been wonderful to me; too kind if anything. I don’t know where I should have been without him, you are not to say anything against him.’
‘I’m not saying anything against him. He is a grand old chap, and that’s what makes it so deucedly awkward! He can’t help being old, but those years are a stone wall between you and him, and you and me.’
‘I don’t think I ever thought of them till I met you.’
‘We can’t go on apart. I’ve got to go to Malta. What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said foolishly as a child, and she began to shiver. Malta had been so ominous. Only the other day she had found the piece of wall from the Citta Vecchian cave, with the healing propensities; it hadn’t healed her troubles.
‘There is such a thing as divorce.’
‘Oh no, I couldn’t possibly be divorced; Max has been too kind to me, and I love him. None of this is his fault.’
Piers caught her then and gave her an impatient shake. He drew her nearer, kissing her as Max had never kissed her, and never would. She couldn’t go on pretending, even if it were the right thing to do. She could not go on playing on the fringe, and she knew it. Right from now, nothing else mattered any more. ‘Darling Piers, I don’t know what to do,’ she admitted.
‘We can’t waste these precious years, we can’t just sit waiting for Max to die and set you free.’
‘That is a horrible thing to say.’
‘I dare say, but that is the truth! That is what it amounts to.’
‘It doesn’t; I don’t want to think along those lines.’
He held her body closely against his, and she hoped that he would not know how her pulse rose and fell, nor how near she was to breaking down.
‘In three weeks’ time I sail out to Malta in the Lion. It will be a three years’ commission. I go away for ever, or I take you with me. Which is it to be?’
It would have to be Malta!
She had had that conviction the night that she had cruised past the island, with the sea of sapphire and the stone hoops of the Upper Barracca against a starry sky. Malta was the time and place, there was no good fighting against it.
‘What can we do?’ she asked tremulously.
‘I refuse to leave things up in the air like this. We must either set the wheels of divorce going, or part. We can’t leave it, and you know that. There isn’t much time, my pretty, there isn’t a dickens of a lot of time.’
‘I’ve got to think.’ Then suddenly she was afraid that she would lose him, and turned to cling to him. ‘At least we have now. This moment is ours. If only time would stand still! If only we didn’t have to go on, ever!’
‘You still haven’t grown up,’ he said, ‘you are nothing but a child, maybe that is what is so adorable in you. All the same this is something we have got to make up our minds about.�
��
‘I know, I know, but not now.’
They sat there in the open car, with the ecstasy of the night around them. The trees had grown still with that hush of sanctuary which comes to them at eventide. Neither of them needed words with which to describe their feelings, because now there was complete understanding, a proximity which did not ask that they should speak.
It was almost morning when they got home.
12
Again she felt herself swinging this way and that. She would have told Max about it, but he happened to be out of sorts, and he went up to London again to see a specialist who was always helpful. It was his asthma. Asthma, she told herself, does not kill, and ironically found that satisfying, because she did not want Max to die; she cared for him too much, yet at the same time she loved Piers. She kept telling herself that if only she had time, she would be able to find the right way out, but time was short. In a couple of weeks, Piers would be returning to Plymouth to join the Lion and sail for three years. That looked like eternity!
‘If you loved me, you would not think of staying here,’ he told her, when they met outside the post office. His love was possessive and he could not understand that it was possible for her to care for the two men. It was a triangle in her life, like the silly triangles she had drawn to amuse herself in the old days at Dukeleys, with father and mother and the Bint at the three corners; now it was herself, and Piers, and Max.
‘You can’t dismiss me so easily to three years’ exile,’ he said, ‘I’ll be lonely. Three years without you is a hell of a time. We’ll be so much older at the end of it.’ He spoke with the reproach of youth which looks upon thirty as representing senility.
‘I know you’re right; but Max isn’t at all well, and I don’t think it would be fair to worry him now.’