by Martin Boyd
“You are right,” he said. He dropped the sketch on the floor, face up, and screwed his heel on the wet paint.
“That was probably the last thing you’ll ever do,” said Cynthia.
“You don’t say that because you think it,” Brian replied. “I’m twenty-three. You can have no idea of what I’ll do. You only say it to treat me for conceit.”
There was too much feeling in the room, and Anthea repeated that we must go.
“Josie is coming with us,” said John. “We just have to collect her things from Miss Felpham’s. It won’t take ten minutes.”
“How can she? There’s no room,” said Anthea.
“I’m afraid that one of you will have to sit in the back with Guy.”
“Why can’t Josie sit in the dickey?”
“We must divide the relations,” said John politely, but there was a glint in his eye. He and Josie went down through the paddock and up through the orchard to his car.
“This is absurd,” said Anthea crossly. “Who’s going to sit in the back? I shan’t. He should have said that he was going to bring her back when he asked us.” She turned to me. “Can’t you stay the night?”
“I told Aunt Mildy I’d be back.”
“Oh, you mustn’t fail your aunt, of course. You could walk to Ringwood and take the train.” It was seven miles to Ringwood.
“Still one of us would have to sit in the back,” said Cynthia. She had suddenly become quiet and kind and reasonable. “It’s a lovely evening, I’ll walk to Ringwood with Guy.”
Although I was not consulted about this arrangement, I was delighted at it. Owing to the limited number of my girl friends it appeared almost miraculous that I should be about to walk seven miles through the summer evening alone with a girl, especially with one of the twins. I thought anything might happen.
We walked across the valley to the road, and Brian, now that his guests were departing, became very polite, and the twins themselves put on their gracious veneer.
The car, trailing clouds of white dust, came round a bend in the road. When they pulled up John signed to Josie to move closer to him, and Anthea got in at the far side.
John asked me: “Are you sure you’re all right?” When I said I was, he shook hands with me over the side of the car, and said: “Thank you very much for showing me the way.”
Josie said to Brian: “Water the daphne and give it plenty of leaf mould. If you look after it, it may bloom this year and you’ll get delicious whiffs when you’re sitting outside having your tea.”
“You’re a delicious whiff, yourself,” said Brian, smiling at her.
We all laughed, and John, looking sideways at Josie, let in the gear.
Cynthia and I waited until the dust had settled before following on foot. Brian shook hands with us, and when Cynthia’s back was turned he gave me a slow wink before putting his hands in his pockets and strolling back through his orchard, glowing and russet in the evening light.
We walked down the hill, crossed the river on the black wooden bridge and turned towards Ringwood. Cynthia was subdued and did not speak much at first. She recognized, when Brian told her she was treating him for conceit, that it was true. She had trained herself to accept everything she believed to be true, and although at times her intellect impaired her human kindness, on this occasion it had brought it into play. The process was a little painful and it took her about half an hour to recover her usual poise, like a sea-anemone, slowly putting out its tentacles, after a boy has poked it with his finger.
The river was on our left, and the wooded hills rose on either side. At intervals, in a little clearing was a whitewashed cottage with a bark chimney, built in the early days by prospectors for gold, who believed it could be found in the sands in the river.
“This is like Siegfried’s journey to the Rhine,” I said, with my urge to relate my own experience to a parallel glowing with romance and music.
“I don’t see much resemblance,” said Cynthia.
“We are walking between woods.”
“That’s not enough reason to drag in Siegfried.”
“That’s the Rhine,” I said, nodding towards the Yarra, “and it’s gold has been stolen. Listen, can’t you hear the Rhine maidens?”
“No,” said Cynthia.
We walked on in silence. The sun was setting and the tops of the wooded hills were greenish bronze, but below the line of light everything was sunk in purple mists. Here I was, alone with a girl in this lovely place. I thought we should automatically break through into some experience of magic beauty, but did not know how it would happen. Vaguely I felt that Cynthia’s intellect was the obstacle, and I was rather cross. Perhaps Cynthia herself thought that we were not making much use of our situation, for when we were crossing over a gully, a deep mysterious and aromatic hollow, screened from the road by a wooden fence, she climbed up on the rail and said:
“Tell me a story.”
“What about?” I asked, sitting beside her.
“Anything unusual.”
“About a girl and a young man?”
“That’s very usual.”
“This girl wasn’t.”
“Why not?”
“She’d lost her head.”
“That’s not unusual. Anyhow, how did she lose it?”
“It was knocked off.”
“Is that the end of the story?”
“Not at all.”
“But the girl was dead.”
“This one wasn’t. She walked about without her head.”
“Il n’était que le premier pas qui coutait,” said Cynthia, unable to resist such an opportunity. As I did not understand she continued: “How could she if she was dead? You are not suspending my disbelief.”
“She was a nymph and it was magic.”
“Well, I don’t mind a bit of magic on a summer night,” she said, almost with Anthea’s intonation. “Go on.”
“All the young chaps ran after her.”
“Why?”
“Because she hadn’t got a head.”
“That doesn’t seem very sensible.”
“It was very sensible. She couldn’t tell them to go away and it didn’t matter if her face was not very pretty.”
“But she hadn’t got a face.”
“I mean the idea of her face.”
“I doubt if the idea of a face could exist in that way.”
“Of course it could. I can imagine all sorts of faces that haven’t got bodies. Anyhow, she had to agree with everything they said. She couldn’t answer them back or boss them, so each of the young chaps in that village took her for walks on successive Saturday nights.”
“They must have been very bored,” said Cynthia coldly, “and very stupid to go with anyone so brainless.”
“It was very agreeable. And though she was brainless she had strong arms and could pull the chaps’ hair if they went too far. In fact when they told their friends in other villages, those chaps knocked all the girls’ heads off too, and there were no lovers’ quarrels in all that country, just peaceful walks on Saturday nights.”
“Is that the end of it?”
“No, because the goddesses were furious when they saw all the girls going about without heads, and they blamed the first girl for setting the fashion, and they turned her into stone, just as she was grabbing a chap’s hair, and he was turned into stone too.”
“I don’t think much of that story,” said Cynthia, and she got down from the fence.
That was the nearest I ever came to a flirtation with one of the twins.
When I reached home, and told Mildy that I had walked all the way from Warrandyte to Ringwood, alone with Cynthia, mostly in the dark, she was aghast. She asked me questions about the time we had taken, to discover what opportunities we might have had for dalliance.
“Did you stop to rest on the way?” she asked, looking intently into my eyes.
“We sat on a fence for five minutes,” I said.
She looked both r
elieved and disappointed, and during the evening I felt her eyes resting on me with suspicion and envy, while her imagination conjured up scenes of wantonness on the Ringwood road.
“Have you a headache?” she asked.
CHAPTER TEN
Diana was waiting in the house at Brighton for Russell to call for her. She felt wretched. She had let the two servants go out after tea, and at six o’clock Wolfie went to Melbourne, ostensibly to a “Saturday night reunion of musicians”, a fixture for many years, which she now realized had been a cover for visits to Mrs Montaubyn or her precursors. She half hoped that tonight he was going to see her, as it would give stronger justification to her own departure, but she was not cheered by the possibility.
He came to tell her that he was leaving. He did not look smart, but as usual like a village boy who has tidied himself up under protest to go to Sunday School. Normally she supervised his dressing, fixing his collar, pulling his coat straight, and brushing him down; but since the ball she had left him to himself, and he showed signs of her neglect.
A week or so earlier she had lent him a pound as he was setting out on one of these jaunts. He now took a handful of coins from his pocket and picked out from them the only sovereign. He handed it to her saying: “Here is the pound I borrowed from you.”
It was unusual for him to return money he had borrowed from her, unless she asked for it, which she only did in an emergency. Clearly he wanted to end their strained relations and to be reconciled. Perhaps, after all, he was not going to Mrs Montaubyn, as, if he gave her the pound it would only leave him a few shillings, not enough to take her out to dinner. She felt confused and ashamed and did not want to take anything from him even though it was her own.
“Oh, don’t give it to me now,” she said.
“I may have it?” asked Wolfie, looking pleased, both at keeping the money and at a sign that Diana was relenting. This sudden change from an air of pompous guilt to naive pleasure was so characteristic of him that it made vivid in a moment all the long years of their life together, and the anger which she had been laboriously sustaining, became dangerously weak. She thought: “This may be the last time I’ll see him,” and she went with him to the door, and then, impulsively, she kissed him.
She turned into the empty house which she was to leave in an hour. She had been quietly packing in her room since tea-time. She was not taking many things. The clothes she left behind could be given away. She had written a note for Wolfie and a letter to Josie, and she had nothing to do but wait.
She thought she had been idiotic to kiss Wolfie, and yet she could not feel sorry that she had done so. It would make him think that she was utterly treacherous, when he came back and found her gone. Josie too must think her treacherous, when she found that she had said good-bye to her as if for four days, when it was for a year or perhaps longer. For twenty years she had been the strength and stay of the family. They would be bewildered to find her gone. She felt as if she had arranged to commit a murder.
She went round the house saying good-bye to the different rooms, and in every one she was overwhelmed with memories. She went into Josie’s room, and into Daisy’s and again felt in them all the love and amusement and anxiety the children had given her. In an hour it would be ended for ever. “I can’t go,” she told herself. She certainly would not be able to go, she thought, if she continued to give way to these feelings, and she returned to the drawing-room where she lighted a jet in the chandelier, and sat down to reason with herself.
“What will happen if I don’t go?” she thought. “Wolfie will never change. People will go on pitying me, Josie may marry soon, and I shall be here alone. Russell offers me the most wonderful life, the sort of life I have always wanted. We get on perfectly together. It would be outrageous to fail him after all his kindness.” She repeated these arguments to herself, but they did not change her feelings. “It has been arranged too suddenly,” she thought. “I really need more time to become used to the idea.” But it was she who had wanted to make the sharp break. “I don’t know myself,” she thought, and her wretchedness came near to panic.
She could not sit still, and she began to walk about the darkening house again. The walls seemed to reproach her, to send out emanations they had absorbed from the children’s lives. All their laughter and their pains seemed to have been absorbed into their surroundings, into the things they used.
The house was full of ghosts, but ghosts of the living, and of the living who were most dear to her. They poured on her, as on myself at Westhill forty years later, with full hands, their treasures and their calamities. It was not, as it has been claimed a house should be, a machine to live in. It was a material substance that absorbed life from the lives and feelings of those who lived in it, and which gave out again to console them for vanished time, the life that it had absorbed. When she left it, she would cut her life in half, and with a sense of desperation, she went from room to room, choosing various small objects to take with her so that her loss would not be absolute. From Josie’s room she took a small watercolour of Westhill. It was really Josie’s but when she found it had gone, she would know, Diana hoped, that the theft was an act of love. She thought of taking the reputed Parmigiano from the drawing-room, but it might be valuable, and she thought it might be a mean thing to do. There had always been speculations and jokes about it, and she could imagine their dismay, not at its loss, but at some kind of repudiation of one of those many trivial causes of amusement which together added so much to the substance of family affection, when they came in and said: “Mummy’s taken the Old Master.”
From Wolfie’s room she took a blue vase which Harry had given her at Christmas when he was twelve, and she collected photographs of the children from various parts of the house. She took a Florentine pottery bowl which her mother had brought back from Europe for her when she was a child. It was of no value and she would probably be going where she could buy hundreds of such things, but she had known it nearly all her life and it would help to give her a feeling of continuity. She put these things on her bed and looked at the pitiful array; all the material evidence she would have of her past life.
She tried to encourage herself by feeling angry with Wolfie, but she did not feel angry, even when she thought of Mrs Montaubyn. Then she thought of Russell, all his attractive qualities and his kindness, but they seemed irrelevant. She could only think of the children and of her life being cut in half.
While she was standing there looking in desperation at the photographs and the blue vase, the watercolour and the pottery bowl, she heard a motor car stop at the gate. She could not let Russell see these things, and she opened one of her cases and managed to squeeze them in. Then she looked in the glass, and surprised at her tragic face, she tried to smile. The bell jangled down in the back passage, and feeling that she was going to execution, she went to open the door.
Josie and John were standing there. He was carrying her suitcase.
She stared at them for a moment, unable to speak.
“You do look surprised, Mummy,” said Josie.
“I thought you were not coming till Monday,” Diana explained at last.
“I wasn’t but something’s happened.”
“Nothing unfortunate?”
John and Josie laughed. “We don’t think so,” she said.
Diana looked at him. “Aren’t you—er—”
“Captain Wyckham,” said Josie.
“Of course. Won’t you come in?” She gave this invitation but she stood uncertainly in the doorway. She wondered how soon she could get rid of him. But then Josie would still be here. Would she catch Russell if she rang up immediately? The situation was appalling.
“I’d like to come in if I may,” said John apologetically, feeling that he was not very welcome.
“Did you drive Josie down?” asked Diana, saying anything to give herself time to think. “That was kind of you.”
“Yes. Josie and I have something to tell you.”
Di
ana had been so completely submerged in her own feelings and her situation, that for a moment she thought that they must somehow have discovered her intention, and have come to prevent her. But what had this young man to do with it?
“Won’t you come in?” she repeated and led them into the drawing-room. She stood under the bleak light of the solitary gas jet and turned to hear what John had to say.
“Aren’t you well, Mummy?” asked Josie.
“I’m perfectly well, darling.” Diana tried to smile reassuringly. “I was only startled to see you there. You must forgive me,” she said to John.
“I hope you’ll forgive me, Mrs von Flugel,” he replied.
“Why, what have you done?”
“I’ve asked Josie to marry me.”
“Oh! Do sit down.” She felt her knees weaken, and did so herself.
“Aren’t you pleased?” asked Josie, a little plaintively.
Diana put her hand to her head.
“Yes, I think I will be. I’m sure I will be. It’s rather much to take in. I had no idea … I don’t really know you,” she said to John.
“He’s awfully nice,” said Josie. John moved close to her and took her hand.
“I’m sure he is.” She felt that if she were not careful she might burst into hysterical laughter. Supposing Russell walked in at this moment? In fact he was certain to, within a quarter of an hour. Then when she thought of him, she realized that it would not matter at all, as she knew that she could rely on him in any situation. He would pretend that he had been driving past and had looked in on the chance of finding someone at home. And she would have a respite. There would be arrangements to make. She would have time to accustom herself to the idea of her situation.
As this dawned on her she felt a tremendous surge of relief, and she was able to give the two young people her entire affectionate interest.
“Now you must tell me everything,” she said, “or tell me a little. I don’t know anything. I didn’t know you knew each other.”
“I introduced you at Government House,” said Josie. “I told you I knew him.”