Dusty Answer

by Rosamond Lehmann

  The poplars seemed to grow all in a moment and hide it. It was gone.

  ‘Well Martin, how are you? What’s been happening to everybody? How are they all?’

  She was slipping back, she was slipping back.

  They left Cambridge behind them, and she tried to recall it, to make it come before her eyes, and could not. The dream of wake, the dream of sleep – which had it been?

  She wondered if she would ever remember it again.

  Yesterday Martin had been standing with her under the cherry tree.

  Now he was telling her about his home in Hampshire. He acted as estate agent for his mother now that his father was dead. She must really come and stay with them and meet his mother. He was perfectly happy farming his own land: he never wanted to do anything else. He was improving the fishing and shooting: they had just bought a bit of land they had been after for two years: half a mile more river and a biggish wood. Forestry was the most fascinating subject: he was going to take it up more seriously. Martin’s life seemed very happy, very ordered, very clear and useful. He knew what he wanted.

  The cousins had all been scattered this last year or so. Mariella had been working with a woman vet in London. She had spent most of last summer at his home because she had been hard up and obliged to let the house on the river. Peter had been there too. He seemed a nice enough little chap, but nervy. He had a nursery governess now, and Mariella seemed to think more about her dogs than him. At least that was the impression she gave. Mariella, so Martin said, had not changed at all.

  Julian he had scarcely seen. He thought he wrote about music for one or two weeklies, but he didn’t know which. Also he had heard that he was writing a ballet, or an opera or something; but he did not suppose it was serious. He had developed asthma since the war, poor chap, and he spent all the winter abroad and sometimes the summer too.

  And Roddy. Oh, Roddy seemed to be messing about in Paris or in London nearly always, doing a bit of drawing and modelling. Nobody could get him to do any work: though last year he had done some sort of theatrical work in Paris – designing some scenery or something – which had been very successful. He was saying now that he would like to go on the stage. Martin laughingly said he was afraid Roddy was a bit of a waster. Anyway he was coming for a week or so, and Judith would see him for herself.

  At six o’clock in the evening they stopped before the front door of her home. There, waiting to enfold her again, was the garden. The air was sweet with the smell of roses and syringa, the sun-flooded lawn stretched away towards the river, and the herbaceous border was burning miraculously with blue delphinium spires, white and yellow lilies, and great poppies.

  ‘Good-bye Martin. It’s been lovely. We’ll meet soon, won’t we? Come and fetch me.’

  She went into the cool and shadowed hall. There was the old butler hastening forward to receive her; and her mother’s voice came from the drawing-room saying softly:

  ‘Is that my girl?’

  Part Four

  1

  She was ready for the picnic. She wore a yellow linen frock and a hat of brown straw, shaped like a poke bonnet and trimmed with a beautiful yellow ribbon. It was Mamma who tied the ribbon in a great bow: the loops fell in the nape of her neck and the ends ran down between her shoulder blades.

  ‘Lovely young creature,’ said Mamma dispassionately observing her.

  Judith had been home more than a week, and Mamma was being charming. She had taken her to London to buy frocks. They had stayed at Jules for a couple of nights, and Mamma had ordered pretty clothes generously from her own dressmaker. She had said at last in her curious, harsh yet beautiful voice, with a shrug of her shoulders, as Judith paraded before her in the fifteenth model:

  ‘As you see, everything suits that child.’

  And the dressmaker had solemnly agreed.

  They had been together to a play, and to the opera; and every morning and every night Judith sat on Mamma’s bed and they chatted together with friendly politeness, almost with ease.

  She was a woman exquisitely dressed, manicured, powdered and scented. Her face did not age, though the colourless cheeks were now a little hollowed, and the eyes sharper. Her eyes were like blue diamonds, and she had an unkind reddened mouth with long pointed corners. The bones of her face were strong and sharp and delicate, and something in the triangular outline, in the set of the eyes, the expression of the lips, made you think of a cat.

  She was elegant in mind as well as in person, capable, quickwitted. Her conversation was acute and well-informed over a wide field, – and men admired and delighted in her. She had always, thought Judith, seemed to move surrounded by men who paid her compliments. She had no woman friends that you could remember. She remarked, now and then, how much she disliked women; and Judith had felt herself included in the condemnation. She had never been pleased to have a daughter: only a handsome son would have been any good to her. Her daughter had discerned that far back in a childhood made vulnerable by adoration of her.

  There was scarcely anything about Mamma to remember: nothing but a vague awestruck worshipful identification of her with angels and the Snow Queen.

  There was one night when she had come in, dressed for a dinner party, all in white, with something floating rosy and iridescent about her. The dress had geraniums on it, at breast, waist and hem, a bunch on one shoulder, and flowing geranium-coloured ribbons. There were diamonds in her fair cloud of hair. She bent over the cot, smiling secretly with eyes and lips as if she were very pleased; and Judith hid her face from that angelic presence; and neither of them spoke a word. A man’s voice called: ‘Mildred!’ from the door: not Papa.

  ‘Come in,’ she said, ‘here’s the child.’

  Somebody tall and moustached came and stood beside Mamma and looked down, making jokes and asking silly questions, and laughing because she would neither answer nor look at him.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Judith,’ said Mamma.

  ‘She hasn’t a look of you,’ said the man.

  ‘No, nothing of me at all.’ Her voice sounded bored.

  ‘Are you sorry?’

  ‘Fred isn’t.’

  They both laughed a little.

  They stood leaning on the cot-rail in silence side by side, and Judith’s hand stole out unnoticed and touched a geranium. She gave it a little pull and it slipped out of the bunch into her hand.

  ‘Come then,’ said Mamma; and then over her shoulder, ‘Go to sleep, Judith.’

  She would have been annoyed if she had noticed the geranium. It was not real after all: it was made of pink velvet. Judith hid it under her pillow.

  Mamma slipped her hand into the man’s arm and floated away.

  That was the only vivid recollection of her left. The children next door came close on the heels of the geranium-frock in memory; and after that they, and not Mamma, absorbed her passion. Mamma was more and more away, or busy; and more and more obviously not interested in her daughter. All life that was not playing next door, or alone in the garden, was lessons and governesses. Mamma and Papa were relentless about education.

  They had dual personalities in Judith’s mind. There were Mamma and Papa who loved each other, of course, and loved their only daughter; and sometimes took her to the seaside, and now and then to London for the pantomime. Once or twice she went abroad with them; but on the many occasions when they left her behind, they wrote her affectionate letters which she dutifully replied to in French, so that they might see how her French was progressing; and they brought her back beautiful presents. Often when they were at home they read aloud to her in the evenings.

  The three were blent in a relationship of a romantic and consoling sort, – an ideal relationship; but then Fred and Mildred would take the place of Mamma and Papa, and shatter the illusion. For they, alas, seemed made of stronger and more enduring fibre: they were real: and they were not often toge
ther: and when they were, there was often coldness and now and then quarrelling. Life with Fred and Mildred was neither comforting nor secure. Fred was quite an elderly man, and terrifyingly silent and preoccupied. He read and wrote books, and had a few elderly friends. Sometimes these would pause for a moment between their long spaces of ignoring her; and, searching her face, would tell her she was growing up like her father. And, each time, their voices, their faces, their words made an unknown past spring up in her for a moment, rich with undreamed-of vanished graces – and she would go away with an ache of sadness. People loved Fred; Mildred they admired and deferred to, but did not love. That was clear at an early age, when Judith went walking with one or other of them past the row of cottages at the top of the garden, and they stopped to speak to the cottage people over the fences. The cottage people had one sort of voice, look, reply for Fred; and quite another for Mildred.

  Judith grew up with a faint obscure resentment against Mildred for the way she treated Fred, for her competence – her dry, unmerciful, cynical success in dealing with the world. Fred was not at home in the world: even less at home, thought Judith, than she herself; but Mildred was steeped in its wise unkindnesses. She did not seem to realize that Fred needed to be looked after.

  Then he died; and they became Mamma and Papa again. Mamma had been gentle, tired-looking, and pale in her black clothes, and dependent for a little while on Judith. She had not spoken much of Papa; but she seemed engrossed in sad contemplations, and her replies to letters spoke of him with tenderness and pride.

  But all that had not lasted long. After the first six months she had not appeared to want Judith much during vacations. She was always visiting, always travelling, always surrounded by flattering talkative men and bridge-playing scented women; and she came only once for a few hours to College during the whole three years. She had a flat in Paris, with a little room for Judith; but she expected Judith to lead her own life and to stay with her own friends, or with the one aunt, Papa’s sister, for a part, at least, of every vacation. Reading-parties, short visits to friends’ homes, long visits to the old literary maiden aunt in Yorkshire, had absorbed the time. There had been one rapturous summer month alone with Jennifer in a cottage in Cornwall; but there had never been a visit to Jennifer’s home. Her parents, she said, were too unpleasant to be inflicted upon anybody except herself; and then only for brief spaces and at rare intervals. Like Roddy, she appeared and vanished again, without a background, blazing mysteriously into and out of ordinary life.

  The hoped-for letter from Mariella, asking her to stay, had never come. She had not seen Mariella since the summer of Papa’s death; and had had no sign from her save one little ill-expressed conventional letter of sympathy, sent, so the writer said, from them all ‘to tell you how dreadfully we simpathise.’ (But Martin had written a note on his own account.)

  The wandering vacations abroad and in England had become a habit; and now, all at once, there was home again. Mamma had come home, out of pure kindness and consideration for Judith; for she did not love it, did not want to live there, found it a heavy expense; and had, so she said, several magnificent opportunities of selling it.

  ‘But it seemed only fair you should have it, this summer at any rate,’ she said. ‘I know you feel romantic about it.’ She added, ‘I see no reason why we shouldn’t spend a very pleasant summer together. You are very companionable – quite well-read now and quite intelligent; and extremely presentable, I will say. I do not intend you to stay with me permanently. I should find it extremely tiresome to be always dragging you about with me; and I dare say you’d dislike it too. We are quite unsuited to being together for long; we should only irritate each other. I thought you might have made up your mind what you wanted to do by now –’ (Mamma’s remarks had generally a faint sting in their tails) –, ‘however, since you haven’t, I look forward to having you with me, till the winter at least. You can decide then what you will do, and I will help you if I can. Does this arrangement suit you?’

  The arrangement promised to work admirably. It was a step of considerable importance, thought Judith, that Mamma should want her at all. And even though they never spoke intimately, they were never at a loss for topics: there were books, people, plays, and clothes to discuss. And Mamma seemed happy in the garden, reading or wandering about; she admitted that she loved going out with a basket and a pair of scissors to cut flowers for all the rooms.

  Surely it was going to be possible at last to establish a satisfactory relationship; to feel deep affection as well as interest, admiration, and that curious pang and thrill of the senses which her scent, her clothes, the texture of her skin and hair gave you and had given you from babyhood.

  Mamma finished tying the bow, remarked: ‘Well – enjoy yourself,’ in a half-amused, half-mocking voice; and dismissed her to her picnic.

  2

  They were all collected at the front door as she came down the drive: all except Roddy. They had ceased to hold terror for her now, or anguish: she had grown up. She could observe the tall group they made without a tremor. What a way they had of all standing together, as if to prevent a stranger from breaking in among them! But that did not matter now. Since she had met them again, there had been no approach to intimacy on either side, no significant interchanges; and she had not minded, had not lain awake feverish with doubt and longing. She was equal to them now. Her heart was in a stupor or dead; and it seemed as if they were never going to disturb her any more.

  Mariella, Julian, Martin; but no Roddy …

  Julian had come down for the day. He was more cadaverous than ever. His face was composed of furrows, projections, and hollows, with eyes blazing far back in his head. A lock of his thick brown hair had turned white. He wore elegant white flannel trousers and an apricot-coloured shirt of softest silk; and he made Martin, in blue cotton shirt and old grey flannels, look rustic and unkempt

  ‘Pile in,’ said Martin. ‘Mariella, I can’t let you drive my new car. You do understand, don’t you, angel?’

  ‘I’m not at all a good driver,’ said Mariella, smiling vaguely round upon them all. ‘I smashed Martin’s car to pieces last year, didn’t I, Martin? I ran it into a wall. He was awfully nice about it.’

  ‘He’s an awfully nice man,’ said Julian, putting his hand on Martin’s shoulder.

  Martin was the only one who ever received obvious marks of affection from the rest. They all treated him in the same way – with a sort of teasing tenderness.

  ‘Judith will you come in front with me? And Mariella and Julian, you go there … Yes, that’s right. Will you be comfortable? Are you all quite happy?’ Martin was terribly anxious lest there should be a hitch. Everyone had got to enjoy the picnic.

  ‘Is the food in? And the drink? Who’s got the opener? Oh, I have. Mariella, remember that this is Julian’s Day in the Country and don’t sit there and never open your mouth, but point out objects of interest as we go along, and any country sight or sound you happen to notice. Are we ready then? To Monk’s Water, isn’t it?’

  The car swooped up the drive.

  ‘Is Martin safe?’ cried Julian clinging to Mariella. ‘I don’t believe he’s safe. If he goes fast I shall jump out. Oh let’s stay at home and have a picnic in the garden. Don’t let’s go away from this nice house and see objects of interest. I didn’t mean it when I suggested it. I never wanted to. Oh why can’t you ever see a joke any of you? Oh! …’

  He subsided with a groan and shut his eyes as Martin swung round the corner and out on to the road. Mariella was giggling like a little girl, Martin was grinning, everybody was in the proper picnic mood. But where was Roddy?

  ‘Martin, what’s happened to Roddy?’

  ‘Oh, Roddy,’ said Martin. ‘Poor old Roddy’s got a headache.’

  ‘A headache?’ Something leapt painfully in her.

  ‘Yes. We left him lying down. The idiot would play tennis all yesterday i
n the broiling sun without a hat, and the consequence is a touch of the sun I suppose. He kept me awake most of the night shivering and warning me he was going to be sick. He looked awful at breakfast I must say, – bright yellow; so we gave him an aspirin and put him on the sofa and left him.’

  ‘Left him, Martin? But oughtn’t someone to have stayed with him?’

  ‘Oh Lord no. He’ll sleep it off and be all right tomorrow. His temper was his worst trouble, so we thought we’d keep away.’

  Martin laughed cheerfully, as if he were amused about Roddy’s headache. How cruel, how callous people were! They called themselves his friends and they left him ill and alone, and went off to enjoy themselves. He might get worse during the day: he might be sickening for a serious illness.

  Roddy’s absence and his headache mattered terribly. She realized suddenly that it was chiefly because of seeing him that she had looked forward to the picnic; that she had hoped to watch him, to talk to him; that she had had a pang of dismay at his absence from the group by the door; that she had been secretly alert for his coming, in a fever for some mention of him until the very moment of starting; and that then a weight had descended; and that now the day was utterly ruined.

  After all, was she going to be obliged to live, to feel, to want again?

  Roddy was lying in the deserted house, on the red sitting-room sofa, with the blinds down. His forehead and closed eyes were contracted with his headache. He tossed his head and buried it in the cushions; and his hair got ruffled, and the cushions became more and more uncomfortable. He swore. You came in on tip-toe and knelt down beside him.

  ‘Roddy, I’ve come to see you,’ you whispered.

  ‘Oh, Judy, I’ve got such a headache and nobody cares.’

  ‘Darling, I care. I’m so terribly sorry. I’ve come to make it better.­’

  You stroked his forehead with cool fingers, smoothed his pillows, gave him a drink and told him to lie still.