She said nothing, but their eyes held one another and he knew that in her surged the same almost unbearable excitement and happiness as now possessed him. He had so completely forgotten everything and everyone else in the world that it was with a kind of astonished shock that Primrose’s indistinct drawl reached his hearing.
“I’m thinking of going back to London, myself, to-morrow. I don’t seem to be particularly wanted here.”
“But you’ve only just come!” cried Jess, scandalized.
“It’s cold and dull, I’m afraid,” Valentine said. Her voice was level, but the light had gone out of her face.
She looked her real age again.
“However, we can talk about it later, Primrose. I think it’s bedtime now.”
“Gosh, what a pity,” Jess remarked. “We’ve had marvellous fun, haven’t we?”
She gave her sketchy salute, that included them all, and picked up her dog.
“You ought to make aunt Sophy walk up the stairs,” Lonergan told her. “The way you carry her about, you’re just teaching her to make a show of herself, the wretched creature. Go on up to the landing and then call her.”
“She won’t come.”
“She will.”
All of them, except Primrose who never turned her head, fixed their attention on the puppy.
While the fat, ungainly creature scrambled up the flight of stairs the two men laughed and Jess screamed encouragement from above.
Valentine had moved to the foot of the stairs, and turned as though to say good-night, but Captain Sedgewick said it first and she answered him with automatic courtesy, as though she were speaking in a dream.
He went upstairs, two steps at a time, and they heard Jess laughing as he joined her on the landing.
Then Primrose did look round.
“Was that general exodus just tact, or a happy coincidence, or did you somehow organize it?” she asked Lonergan, unsmiling.
“Ah, you — cut it out!”
“I only wanted to know.”
If Valentine looked her forty-odd years, Primrose, strangely, appeared far younger than her actual age. She had become an angry, ill-behaved schoolgirl, anxious to hurt because she was herself being hurt and finding only the crudest means of retaliation.
“As it seems a bit late and cold to stand and talk in the porch, I suggest your office once more, Rory. You and I had a very good fire there a little while ago.”
“As you say, Primrose. In fact, I’ve already asked your mother if she’ll be good enough to let me sit and talk to her there.”
“Then I’ll leave you to it. Good-night.”
Valentine and Lonergan both stood, silent and motionless, as Primrose — walking no faster than usual — moved away from them, picking up the long, periwinkle-blue skirt of her house-coat and holding the hampering folds away from her feet as she went up the stairs.
Lonergan turned towards Valentine, saw the stricken look on her face and caught her hand in his, moved by the sheer impulse to comfort her if he could.
“She knows,” faltered Valentine.
Her fingers clung to his.
Lonergan signed his uncertainty, waiting to hear what she would say, that might give him the measure of her insight.
“I thought at first,” said Valentine very slowly, “that it was Primrose who’d attracted you. And that seemed natural. She’s young. But this evening, you told me it was me.”
“And you know that’s true.”
“Yes, I know that’s true. Only I think that, besides being angry, she’s hurt. Were you in love with her, Rory?”
The simplicity and directness of the question moved him very deeply.
“Darling, I’ll answer anything you want me to answer. There’s going to be nothing hidden between us. There’s only this: would you rather talk to Primrose first?”
Valentine shook her head, smiling painfully.
“She wouldn’t let me. I think she hates me. I don’t know when it all began, or even where I went wrong. When she was a little girl—”
Her voice faltered and stopped.
Lonergan, in a passion of pity, took her into his arms.
“Darling — my poor little love! It’s hard for you.”
She clung to him, and he could feel her slight body tensed against the threat of tears.
“Cry, if you want to,” he whispered.
But he saw that she had already commanded herself and that this self-command had grown to be one of the strongest impulses of her nature. If she was to be hurt — and she had been hurt already — he would have to contend with the lifelong habit that would always lead her to conceal pain, perhaps even to deny it.
To Lonergan, an artist and an Irishman, himself emotional and supremely articulate, the thought brought nothing but dismay.
He took her into his office, where the fire still burnt redly, and made her sit in the armchair. Kneeling beside her, with his arm round her, he said gently:
“I’ll tell you anything you like, sweetheart. It’s going to hurt us both, but it had to come. Whatever it’s going to mean, we’ve got to get everything clear between us. Our relationship is far too important for anything else to be possible.”
“Yes,” said Valentine without hesitation.
“You realize that I’ll have to talk like the cad of all the ages, saying all the things that no decent man is ever supposed to put into words? Unless I do that, I’m simply not offering you the truth, as I see it, at all.”
“I do understand.”
“Val, you’re perfect!”
She looked up, suddenly smiling.
“You called me Val!”
“It came very naturally: I called you Val in the Rome days.”
“I know.”
“Darling Val. D’you like me to call you that?”
“I love it.”
The atmosphere was easier, lightened between them. Lonergan drew a long breath of relief.
He saw that Valentine, too, was more relaxed. It was she who spoke first:
“I know Primrose has had love affairs. I know that several men have been in love with her, though I don’t know if they’ve asked her to marry them. She’s never told me anything, of course. But my sister-in-law, Venetia Rockingham, has. She doesn’t like the men that Primrose knows, because they don’t come from one particular set of people. And I think she’s jealous, too. Venetia used to be a great beauty in Edwardian days.”
Lonergan sat silent, holding her closely, knowing that she was gaining time in which to steady herself for the inevitable question.
She came to it at last.
“Rory, were you one of the men who fell in love with Primrose?”
“Yes, darling. That is to say I found her stimulating and physically desirable and my vanity was enormously flattered because she liked me, who am quite old enough to be her father.”
He forced himself to look at her, terrified at the thought of the pain that he must see in her face.
She met his eyes and her own were quiet, but he saw the lines of her mouth, and leaned towards her and kissed it passionately.
“It’s all right,” she whispered, and the childish phrase touched him.
“Primrose is in love with you, isn’t she?”
“Val, it isn’t like that. It isn’t being in love as you mean the words. Primrose isn’t in the least romantic, and if she were — it wouldn’t be about someone like me. She was attracted to me — God knows why — and then I think she liked it because I was more intelligent than most of the men she knows, and I think too, she liked, without knowing it, the fact that I’m of a different class and nationality and religion, and generation. It gives her what she’d call a kick.”
“Have you ever wanted to marry her?”
“Never. It never crossed my mind for one single instant, nor hers either, I’ll swear. I’ve never wanted to marry at all, and Primrose doesn’t believe in marriage.
She may outgrow that, of course, but even so I think she’d alw
ays view marriage realistically. More as the French see it — an affair to be decided upon reasonably and not on an emotional impulse.”
“Will you tell me how it began, between you and Primrose? Has it been going on for a long while?”
“No. I met her at a party in London just after the battalion had been sent down here, and we found out at once that I was stationed here, of course, almost next door to her home, and I said something about finding billets, and then she suggested Coombe.”
“Did you like her at once?”
“I admired her. I liked the contrast between her very aristocratic appearance and her extreme toughness — and there’s a sort of hard realism about her that’s unusual, and that appeals to me. And, as I’ve told you, my vanity was flattered. But Val — none of all that is love. I didn’t love her, any more than she loved me.”
“I know that. But you did — fall in love, I suppose?”
“I did, darling. I’m not going to deny it. I fell a little bit in love with her, as I’ve fallen in love scores of times, and when I saw, as I did, that she was attracted too, I tried to put more into the affair than was really there. It’s always been like that — except with Laurence. Some of the times I’ve been far more in love than others, but even when I’ve gone all out after a woman, I’ve known in my heart that I was riding for a fall. That I wouldn’t find the perfection I was mad enough to believe in, and that I’d only land myself and someone else in a relationship that was bound to end in disappointment and humiliation for both of us. Actually, with Primrose, I felt less of a blackguard than I’ve sometimes felt, because there was never any pretence between us of being out for anything serious or permanent.”
“I think I see,” slowly said Valentine. “But since you’ve been here, Rory?”
“Well, love, since we’ve been here, it’s not been quite so straightforward. I’d only to see you, my girl of the Pincio Gardens, with your hair turned to silver, and I knew that there was the only reality for me. I’d like to say that I’d anyhow not have had the gracelessness to make love to Primrose under her mother’s own roof, but it simply wouldn’t be true. What stopped me was meeting you again.”
“Have you told her that?”
“At first I told her a lot of old cod about behaving decently in the house I was billeted in and so on, that she didn’t believe. And then this evening, no later, we came into the open, to the extent of my telling her I was seriously in love — God, is it serious! — and that everything else was out.”
“Did she understand — no, she couldn’t have understood — that you meant me?”
“She did not — then.”
“Rory, what are we going to do? Primrose is my own child. I can’t hurt her deliberately.”
“Listen, Val. You saw her face to-night, when Jess said we’d been out together in the porch, and you and she suddenly looked at each other. You heard the way she spoke afterwards, about going back to London to-morrow. After she’d gone upstairs you said to me: ‘She knows.’ I think you may be right. She may have guessed.”
Valentine hid her face in her hands.
Lonergan kept silence. He stroked her hair, drawing her head against his shoulder.
When she looked up again the colour seemed to have been drained from her face.
“I don’t know what to do.”
“God forgive me for breaking your sweet heart like this! But dearest, isn’t it true that there’s nothing you can do? Things had gone wrong between you and Primrose before any of this happened. I know she’s angry — perhaps she has a right to be angry, at least with me — but she’s not unhappy, in any way that matters.”
“Why do you say that? She must care for you, at least a little, if you’ve made love to her.”
“I have — but that doesn’t mean she cares for me, in any lasting way.”
“I don’t see how she could help it,” returned Valentine, simply and sadly.
“Val, darling — I love you so much. Can you forgive me for the muddle I’ve made of everything, for the difficulties I’ve involved you in?”
Valentine, with her characteristic gesture, pushed the hair back from her forehead.
She spoke slowly, but without any hesitation.
“Forgiveness doesn’t come into it, Rory. I love you and nothing will ever alter that now. You say that Primrose doesn’t love you. I don’t know that even if she did I could give you up to her. That’s what frightens me.”
Stricken into silence by the utter candour with which she had told him the truth, Lonergan bent his black head over her two hands, kissing them whilst he forced back the tears he could feel rising into his eyes.
“You’ll marry me, my darling?” he whispered, after a little while.
“Is that what you want?”
“With all my heart and soul.”
“But you said you never wanted to marry anyone.” And she added, with an effort that touched him deeply: “Except Laurence.”
“It’s different, now. This is war-time, darling, and there’s no knowing what may happen. We’ve got to belong to each other in every possible way there is, for whatever time we have left.”
“Yes. I think that too. Only there’s Primrose.”
“You’ve no need to feel that you’re taking anything from Primrose, darling. What you’ve got to face is your own knowledge of the fact that I’ve been her lover.”
He looked at her steadily and, for the second time that night, saw the slow, deep colour staining her face.
When she answered it was in a half-whisper.
“I wasn’t perfectly sure.”
“It’s true.”
There was silence again, for what seemed to Lonergan a long time.
At last she said:
“You know, I love you so much that I don’t think anything makes any difference. I don’t know whether that’s right or wrong. I will marry you, Rory.”
X
It was after one o’clock in the morning when Valentine, leaving Lonergan at the foot of the stairs, went quietly up to her own room.
She wanted nothing so much as to be alone with her joy and her sorrow, and she hoped that Madeleine would not be, as she so often was, waiting for her in her room. It was sometimes difficult to get rid of the devoted, tyrannical, affectionate creature, and her native shrewdness, backed by a relationship extending over almost the whole of Valentine’s adult life, made it nearly impossible to keep anything from her.
But Valentine had, most unexpectedly, an encounter to face other than one with Madeleine.
As she moved across the landing, the General’s door opened and the General, in a very ancient Jaegar dressing-gown and without his teeth, appeared.
“There you are,” he mumbled.
“Did you want me, Reggie?”
“Wait a minute,” he ordered, and Valentine waited obediently while he turned back into the room again, put in his teeth and then called to her to come in.
She went in, closing the door behind her.
Her brother stood, leaning on his stick, in the middle of the room.
“Look here, Val, do you know what time it is? Getting on for half-past one. What do you suppose servants and children are going to make of this sort of thing? In another five minutes, I may tell you, I was going to come down myself and get rid of that fellow for you.”
“Thank you very much, Reggie, but that wouldn’t have been in the least necessary.”
“It’s all very well to take that tone, but after all, you’re not an old woman and this house is full of idiots who’ll be only too ready to chatter. What does he mean by it?”
“If you’re talking about Rory Lonergan — and I suppose you are — he and I have been sitting in the breakfast-room — I mean, his office. I wanted to talk to him.”
“I don’t know why on earth you should want to talk to him at all, but if you did, why should you have to choose the middle of the night? It looks bad, old girl — really it does. What are Primrose and Jessica going to make of
it, I should like to know?”
The mixture of indignation and plaintiveness in the General’s manner very nearly caused Valentine to laugh.
“Truly, Reggie, I don’t think there’s anything to worry about,” she said. “And do remember how old I am — nearly forty-five.”
“You don’t look it,” General Levallois rather grudgingly admitted. “I suppose you might tell me that it’s none of my business, but after all, poor Humphrey’s not here to look after you and, personally, I should never trust an Irishman.”
“But I should,” said Valentine.
The General gazed at her in astonishment.
“Val, d’you like this chap?”
“Yes.”
“I thought he was after Primrose. And pretty good cheek if he were, a chap of his age, old enough to be her father. But I must say, I shouldn’t have thought that even an Irishman would have had the nerve to come down here as a pal of Primrose’s and then sit up half the night with her mother. Well, it’s nothing to do with me but I felt bound to tell you what I thought about it. And unless I’m very much mistaken, other people will think the same.”
“I don’t know that I very much mind what other people think, Reggie, and I don’t believe you do either.”
“You don’t want to upset Primrose.”
Valentine shook her head, distress again waking within her.
“Then there’s another thing,” the General admonished her. “Now that I’ve gone so far, I may as well do the thing thoroughly. You’ve got to remember that once upon a time this fellow was, or thought he was, in love with you. You don’t want to have any trouble of that kind cropping up now.”
“Reggie, please don’t go on.”
“I don’t want to upset you, old girl. It’s the last thing I want. You’d better go and get some sleep. Only for the Lord’s sake do have some sense, and realize that you’re still an attractive woman and that a chap like Lonergan, if you don’t keep him in his place, will make a nuisance of himself as soon as look at you. I know the type well.”
Valentine gazed at her brother with a feeling that almost amounted to despair.
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