Late and Soon

by E M Delafield

  “I see.” Jess was still thoughtful though not, Valentine felt, antagonistic.

  “Well,” she said at last, “it’s okay by me, naturally, but do I have to tell Primrose?”

  “No, darling. I only wanted you to understand.”

  “Oh, there isn’t anything to understand,” Jess declared, and Valentine felt that she was firmly, if kindly, repudiating any idea of a possible alliance between them. She might concede to her mother every right to an independent life, but she would never range herself beside her, least of all in opposition to a contemporary of her own.

  “There isn’t anything to understand,” she repeated. “Why shouldn’t you go out to lunch with the Colonel if he asks you? Besides, it isn’t any business of mine, is it? But it’s a bit different for Primrose, because she knew him in London and all that. She’s sure to be ratty, but after all there’s nothing new in that.”

  “Oh, Jess! I wish Primrose was happier. I wish we could do anything.”

  “Honestly, mummie, aren’t you being rather sentimental? I mean, here’s this war going on all over the place, and Poles and Jews being tortured, and babies being bombed, and families all broken up — I can’t feel it matters a scrap whether Primrose is happy or not. Or anybody else, for that matter.”

  Valentine gazed at her, appalled.

  “It’s odds on we shan’t have any kind of happiness in the world, even after the war’s over — if it ever is over — but probably happiness isn’t as frightfully important as one thinks,” Jess said. “I mean, honestly and truly, mummie, what do individual people matter?”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” Valentine admitted sadly, “but I don’t think one ever feels quite like that about one’s children.”

  “Gosh, how funny. I mean,” Jess explained carefully, “funny-peculiar. Shall you be back in time for the Red Cross meeting?”

  “Yes, certainly.”

  “That’ll be fine,” Jess returned, rather absent-mindedly.

  She never attended the Red Cross sewing-parties herself, even when they were held in the drawing-room at Coombe.

  “Would you see if you can find a few chrysanthemums for aunt Venetia’s room?”

  “Okay. And for the boy friend too?” Jess enquired blithely, and Valentine understood that their conversation was over.

  After Jess had gone, she sat on at her desk, not moving, thinking over what she had said: What do individual people matter?

  Valentine had always thought that they did matter. She thought so still, and Jessica’s point of view, so different, and so matter-of-factly expressed, saddened her deeply.

  It surprised her, too, and made her understand afresh how little she knew about the real Jess. She almost felt now as though she knew more about Primrose than about Jess — but each, in their different ways, kept her at arm’s length.

  Her sense of having completely failed as a mother was more overwhelming than it had ever been, although it was so often with her.

  Suddenly and instinctively she raised her eyes to the portrait of Humphrey. The painting, hard and shallow as she thought it, gave her his blunt, rather arrogant features, his straight-gazing eyes that saw things so much more clearly than they had ever seen people, and for an instant — all her perceptions heightened and sharpened by her own new and vivid emotional experience — she realized to the full the utter unreality that their marriage had been.

  “Val!” said her brother’s voice, and he spoke irritably so that she started with a sense of guilt. “What’s all this about Venetia coming here to-night?”

  “She’s got to be at Bristol this afternoon, and she’s coming on here.”

  “What for?”

  “To see us, I suppose,” Valentine suggested, although she felt by no means certain that this was altogether true.

  The General appeared to share her doubt.

  “Doesn’t sound like her. She’ll give a hell of a lot of trouble, as usual, and she’ll expect drink, and talk all through the News. And how’s she going to like the Irishman?”

  “He isn’t coming back to dinner to-night — it’ll probably be about ten o’clock when he gets back — so they won’t see so very much of one another.”

  Valentine, as usual, had spoken to placate. But in her own mind the General’s question woke echoes so that she, also, wondered how Venetia would like the Irishman.

  XI

  The Victoria Hotel was as resolutely Victorian a period-piece as the conservative West of England could produce. Plush portières, enormous sea-scapes painted in oil and framed in gilt moulding, rose-patterned wall-paper, fret work screens and brackets bearing Toby jugs, were all there. The furniture was dark and heavy, and there was a great deal of it.

  Valentine, who had walked in from Coombe, saw Lonergan’s car standing in the yard beside the hotel entrance when she arrived. She enjoyed walking, and the lanes, even in January, showed colour and beauty, and as she walked into the darkness of the hall, knowing that her lover was waiting for her, happiness came back to her in a rush.

  Lonergan was standing before the steel-barred grate in which was glowing a coal fire. He came to meet her.

  “Thank God you’ve come. I’ve been nearly out of my mind.”

  “Am l late?”

  “Well, no. You’re not. But every minute has seemed like an hour. I’d a wild hope you might be here when I arrived. Take off your little hat, darling — I want to see your pretty hair.”

  She pulled off her soft woollen cap and smiled at him.

  “Ah, you’re lovely, Val.”

  His voice, with its warm strength and tenderness, made her want to cry. Looking at her as though he knew and understood this, Lonergan pushed forward a deep chair, and then took one beside her.

  “I’ve ordered sherry. It’s coming now. I got through the morning’s work quicker than I expected and I wanted to come and fetch you, but I thought perhaps you’d have started by some other way and we’d miss one another.”

  “I did come by a short cut — it saves over a mile.”

  “I’ll be able to take you home, so that you’ll be in time for your Red Cross meeting.”

  “How did you remember about that?”

  “The way I’d remember anything that concerns you, my darling.”

  “Rory, you say all the things that no one has ever said to me, and that I’ve always known I should love to hear.”

  The elderly head waiter brought their sherry, and they drank, looking and smiling at one another.

  There were other people in the hall, talking and smoking and drinking, and Valentine and Lonergan spoke together in low voices.

  The ardour and the directness of his love-making gave her a sense of enchantment. She could scarcely believe that she was awake and not somehow, strangely, reverting to romantic fantasies of her girlhood.

  She had meant to speak of Primrose, to tell him that Venetia Rockingham, her competent, hard, rather alarming sister-in-law, was arriving that evening, that she felt afraid of Venetia’s rapid, shallow judgments and unsparing tongue — but all these things fled from her mind.

  They talked only about themselves.

  In the dining-room, after ordering lunch, Lonergan said to her:

  “I’d a letter from Arlette this morning. I’ve brought it, to show you.”

  Very simply, as though she had been his wife already, he handed to her across the table two thin sheets of ruled paper in a cheap blue envelope.

  Valentine was unreasonably surprised to find the letter written in French, in a careful, sloping, characteristically French handwriting.

  The Irish address at the head of the paper looked incongruous.

  It was a lively, amusingly-written letter, showing originality and a certain precocity in the young writer. At the end of the letter she admitted candidly that she often felt lonely, and that her aunt Nellie was very kind to her but “peu sympathique du côté intellectuel”. She asked whether there was any hope of seeing her father again soon, and said that anything e
lse, the war excepted, had for her “peu d’importance”.

  “She’s terribly fond of you, Rory.”

  “The poor child. I want to see her, too.”

  “Of course,” said Valentine, the more gently because of the pain it caused her to realize anew the strength of the link that still bound him to Laurence and the long years that lay behind him — years in which she had no part.

  “Could you get over there?”

  “I doubt it. Unless we suddenly got some embarkation leave. I could manage it then.”

  Afraid that her face might betray her pain, Valentine laid her hand across her mouth and kept her eyes steadily fixed on Lonergan as she uttered her assent.

  “Darling, what is it?” he asked instantly. “If I did go, I’d want you with me — as my wife.”

  She said nothing, knowing that her eyes answered him.

  “Dearest, I was mad to think we could discuss marriage in a public place like this — but thank God I’m coming back to Coombe to-night. We’ll talk then.”

  She handed him back Arlette’s letter.

  “Thank you for letting me see it. Rory, couldn’t we possibly get her over here? She could come to Coombe, if you’d like it.”

  “Ah, you’re sweet. But you don’t understand. Arlette wouldn’t know what to make of a house like Coombe. She’s just a little Parisian bourgeoise”

  “But she’s with your sister now.”

  “Nellie’s a nice old middle-class Irishwoman, darling. She doesn’t belong to your world, any more than I do. It wouldn’t matter to her, living out of her class — though I doubt if she’d enjoy it — because she’s elderly, and simple, and without very much imagination. But it wouldn’t do with a sensitive young girl like Arlette. You’d both be embarrassed.”

  “Oh, Rory, no.”

  “I don’t mean that you’d ever be anything but an angel to her — tolerant, and understanding.”

  “How could one be anything else, with a child — even if she wasn’t your child? And after all, I’ve lived abroad, I’ve met French people.”

  “I know, darling.”

  He paused for a moment.

  “It’s like this, Val. We’ll have to face it sooner or later, just as we’ll have to face everything that’s going to affect our future together. We can’t ignore the fact that your relations won’t know what to make of me — or rather, they’ll think they know only too well — and they certainly wouldn’t know what to make of my child. I don’t mean her illegitimacy.”

  “I know you don’t. I think you’re exaggerating the importance of the old traditions now, Rory. Primrose and Jess, and all their generation, just ignore them.”

  “I’m not so sure. But anyway, love, it’s not Primrose and Jess that matter now. It’s you. Shall you mind that my background has just been Irish middle-class and French bourgeoisie, with a few years of second-rate artistic Bloomsbury thrown in?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Darling, because it’ll mean that your friends won’t have any use for me whatever, and that mine will probably seem to you a strange, rather squalid collection, if you ever meet them.”

  “Don’t you want me to?”

  He hesitated.

  “Well, no. In a way I don’t. I think you’d find them impossible, and that it would distress you. Arlette, of course, is different. She’ll always be a part of my life, and I want you to know each other.”

  “But you don’t want her to come to Coombe?”

  “I don’t, sweetheart. If it was just you, it might be different. But you have people coming and going — and servants—”

  “Oh, Rory! Those two little village girls?”

  “They’re nice little girls, I know,” he conceded, “but English servants aren’t like French ones, or Irish ones either. A real Irish servant is like one of the family. Old Maggie Dolan, who does all the work except what Nellie does herself, gives her opinion freely, I’d have you know, on anything and everybody. Nellie and Arlette very often sit with her, evenings, in the kitchen and she thinks nothing of bawling to Nellie up the stairs if she wants her for anything. It’s a different sort of relation altogether.”

  “It’s probably a much better one than ours, which is artificial. But think of Madeleine — she’s not an English servant.”

  “Madeleine would be shocked, at your having Arlette as a step-daughter. She’s a kind, nice woman — I can see that — and she’d like Arlette and understand her on her own merits — but not as one of your family.”

  Valentine reflected, grievedly and rather sadly, on what he was saying.

  At last she asked:

  “Does it matter much? Supposing that all you’ve just said is perfectly true, need it make any difference to us?”

  “Not so long as we talk it out, and don’t just shirk discussion, and ignore the whole problem. Does that frighten you, dearest?”

  “I think it does, a little. You see, Rory, I’ve always lived amongst people who do, deliberately, ignore a great many things. I’ve taken it for granted that one should.”

  “You have,” he agreed. “Just as you’ve taken it for granted, I think, that if anything hurts you or makes you unhappy, you mustn’t show it.”

  Valentine smiled faintly.

  “It’s the conventional English tradition, isn’t it?”

  “It is, and I’m not saying there isn’t something fine and good about it. But not between two people who love each other as you and I do, Val. We’ve got to be honest with one another. If I hurt you — God knows I won’t want to, but I probably will — you’ll have to let me talk it out with you.”

  “Do you mean, if you were ever unfaithful to me?”

  I don’t, darling. I’ve no right to say it, but I believe I’ll be faithful to you always. And that’s a thing I’ve never felt about anybody else in the world.”

  She murmured her response in a word of endearment, and they were interrupted by the service.

  “Tell me why you said you’d probably hurt me,” she asked, a little later.

  “Because we’re human beings,” Lonergan answered sadly. “Because it’s like that. Even the people who love each other most are bound to hurt one another sometimes in little things. But it’s all right — I mean, it doesn’t spoil anything really — if they’re always able to talk it out together.”

  Valentine thought of her own instinctive reaction to pain. Even in the last forty-eight hours she had experienced it consciously — in the pangs of acute jealousy that she suffered in thinking not only of Arlette, but of Arlette’s dead mother — and had hidden it.

  Quite suddenly, she found that she was smiling.

  “We ought never to have been separated, that time in Rome. We ought to have been together ever since our youth, Rory.”

  “Ah, how right you are!”

  It startled her when she found that they had almost finished their luncheon and that Lonergan was telling the waiter to bring coffee to the table.

  “It’s better than the hall, or lounge, or whatever they call it,” he explained. “Though it’s absurd that I should be trying to tell you how I adore you, here, in public, and in these surroundings. Tell me, love, will we be able to be somewhere this evening, by ourselves?”

  “Oh, Rory, I forgot to tell you. My sister-in-law — Humphrey’s sister Venetia — has telephoned and she wants to come to Coombe for to-night and to-morrow. She’s bringing a young man called Spurway with her. He knows Primrose, I think.”

  “They’ll be there when I get back, then?”

  “I’m afraid so, yes.”

  Lonergan emitted a thoughtful, ejaculatory Damn! but that he was also preoccupied with another idea was evident and he added immediately:

  “Have you seen Primrose this morning?”

  Valentine told him that she had, and that Primrose had spoken to her without any unkindness.

  “But I think she wants to go back to London. She doesn’t want to stay on at home.”

  “Will you and Primros
e say anything to one another before she goes?”

  “It will depend on her,” said Valentine rather faintly. “I don’t really know how much she realizes what’s happened to us. Last night I thought she did.”

  “So did I.”

  “Rory, why don’t I mind more that you’ve been in love with Primrose? I ought to feel it a most terrible thing, that would put a barrier between us for ever. But I can’t feel that. I suppose it would be different if I didn’t know that she’s had other affairs.”

  “I think it would. You see, dearest, Primrose hasn’t either loved me, or even thought that she loved me. She’s very realistic. It’s one of the things I admire about her.”

  Valentine meditated.

  “Do you know, I believe that I do too? It’s hurt me often, that realism of hers, but I do admire it.”

  “You’ve got it too, in a different form. You’re honest with yourself.”

  Valentine felt tears rising into her eyes, partly because she found his words moving and reassuring, and partly at the remembrance of the immense gulf between herself and her daughter that neither admiration nor realism nor courage could ever bridge. She told Lonergan of her conversation with Jess, and of how Jess had said: “What do individual people matter?”

  “She said it in such complete sincerity, Rory. Jess doesn’t ever pose. She truly sees it like that.”

  “I know,” he answered. “It’s a point of view that’s inherent in her generation. It isn’t in ours, and we shan’t ever acquire it. At least, people like you and me won’t.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “The conflict of individual souls does matter,” he insisted. “It matters immensely. I see it as you do, Val.”

  And, looking at her, he repeated her own words of a few minutes earlier:

  “You and I ought always to have been together — ever since the days when we were young and fell in love with one another, and had to let them separate us.”

  Lonergan drove Valentine back to Coombe just before the hour of her Red Cross meeting. As the ancient car bucketed over the ruts and pot-holes of the drive, they passed two girls riding bicycles, and a little way further on, a straggling procession of elderly and middle-aged women plodding along sedately and in silence.