Gabriel, according to Teresa, was a man attractive to women. Presumably Isabella had found him attractive – but if so his male attractiveness was a bald fact to her – it was not disguised by a veneer of spurious understanding. It was as a stranger, an alien, that he came. But did she really find him attractive? Was it possibly his lovemaking that she found attractive and not the man himself?
These, I perceived, were all speculations. And Isabella did not speculate. Whatever her feelings towards Gabriel, she would not analyse them. She would accept them – accept them as a woven part of Life’s tapestry, and go on to the next portion of the design.
And it was that, I suddenly realized, that had aroused Gabriel’s almost maniacal rage. For a split second I felt a stirring of sympathy for him.
Then Isabella spoke.
She asked me in her serious voice why I thought it was that red roses never lasted in water.
We discussed the question. I asked her what her favourite flowers were.
She said red roses and very dark brown wallflowers and what she called thick-looking pale mauve stocks.
It seemed to me rather an odd selection. I asked her why she liked those particular flowers. She said she didn’t know.
‘You’ve got a lazy mind, Isabella,’ I said. ‘You know perfectly well if only you’d take the trouble to think.’
‘Would I? Very well, then, I will think.’
She sat there, upright and serious, thinking …
(And that, when I remember Isabella, is how I see her and always shall see her to the end of time. Sitting in the sunlight on the upright carved stone seat, her head proud and erect, her long narrow hands folded peacefully on her lap and her face serious, thinking of flowers.)
She said at last, ‘I think it is because they all look as though they would be lovely to touch – rich – like velvet … And because they have a lovely smell. Roses don’t look right growing – they grow in an ugly way. A rose wants to be by itself, in a glass – then it’s beautiful – but only for a very short time – then it droops and dies. Aspirin and burning the stems and all those things don’t do any good – not to red roses – they’re all right for the others. But nothing keeps big dark red roses long – I wish they didn’t die.’
It was quite the longest speech Isabella had ever made to me. She was more interested in talking about roses than she had been in talking about Gabriel.
It was, as I have said, a moment I shall always remember. It was the climax, you see, of our friendship …
From where my chair was placed, I faced the footpath across the fields from St Loo Castle. And along that footpath a figure was approaching – a figure in battledress and a beret. With a sudden pang that astonished me, I knew that Lord St Loo had come home.
Chapter Eighteen
Sometimes one has the illusion of a certain series of events having happened a wearisome number of times before. I had that impression as I watched young Lord St Loo coming towards us. It seemed to me that again and again and again I had lain here, helpless, immobile, watching Rupert St Loo coming across the fields … It had happened often before, it would happen again … it would happen throughout eternity.
Isabella, my heart said, this is goodbye. This is Fate coming for you.
It was the fairy story atmosphere again; it was illusion, unreality. I was going to assist at the familiar end of a familiar story.
I gave a little sigh as I looked at Isabella. She was quite unaware of Fate approaching. She was looking down at her long, narrow white hands. She was still thinking of roses – or possibly of very dark brown wallflowers …
‘Isabella,’ I said gently. ‘Someone is coming …’
She looked up, without haste, mildly interested. She turned her head. Her body went rigid, then a little tremor went through it.
‘Rupert,’ she said … ‘Rupert …’
It mightn’t, of course, have been Rupert at all. Nobody could have told at that distance. But it was Rupert.
He came, a little hesitantly, through the gate and up the steps to the terrace, a faintly apologetic air about him. Because Polnorth House belonged to strangers whom he hadn’t yet met … But they had told him, at the castle, that he would find his cousin there.
Isabella rose to her feet as he came up on to the terrace and she took two steps towards him. He quickened his own steps towards her.
She said, ‘Rupert …’ very softly as they met.
He said, ‘Isabella!’
They stood there together, their hands clasped, his head bent just a little protectively.
It was perfect – quite perfect. If it had been a film scene there would have been no necessity for a retake … On the stage, it would have brought a lump to the throat of any romantic playgoing woman over middle age. It was idyllic – unreal – a fairy story’s happy ending. It was Romance with a capital R.
It was the meeting of a boy and girl who had been thinking of each other for years, each building up an image that was partly illusory, and finding when they at last came together, that miraculously the illusion was at one with reality …
It was the sort of thing which doesn’t happen, one says, in real life. But it was happening, here before my eyes.
They settled things, really, in that first moment. Rupert had always held tenaciously, in the back of his mind, to the determination to come back to St Loo and marry Isabella. Isabella had always had the calm certainty that Rupert would come home and marry her, and that they would live together at St Loo … happy ever after.
And now, for both of them, their faith was justified and the vision was fulfilled.
Their moment didn’t last long. Isabella turned to me. Her face was shining with happiness.
‘This is Captain Norreys,’ she said. ‘My cousin Rupert.’
St Loo came forward and shook hands with me and I took a good look at him.
I still think that I have never seen anyone handsomer. I don’t mean that he was of the ‘Greek god’ type. His was an entirely virile and masculine beauty. A lean weather-beaten brown face, a rather large moustache, deep blue eyes, a head perfectly set on broad shoulders, narrow flanks, and well shaped legs. His voice was attractive, deep and pleasant. He had no colonial accent. There was humour in his face, intelligence, tenacity, and a certain calm stability.
He apologized for coming across informally like this, but he had just arrived by air, and had come straight across country from the aerodrome by car. On arrival, he had been told by Lady Tressilian that Isabella had gone over to Polnorth House and that he would probably find her there.
He looked at Isabella as he finished speaking and a twinkle came into his eye.
‘You’ve improved a lot from a schoolgirl, Isabella,’ he said. ‘I remember you with immensely long spindly legs, two flapping plaits, and an earnest air.’
‘I must have looked terrible,’ said Isabella thoughtfully.
Lord St Loo said he hoped he would meet my sister-in-law and my brother, whose paintings he admired very much.
Isabella said that Teresa was with the Carslakes and she would go and tell her. Did Rupert want the Carslakes too?
Rupert said he didn’t want the Carslakes, and he couldn’t remember them anyway, even if they had been here when he was last at St Loo as a schoolboy.
‘I expect, Rupert,’ said Isabella, ‘that you will have to have them. They will be very excited about your coming. Everyone will be excited.’
Young Lord St Loo looked apprehensive. He had only got a month’s leave, he said.
‘And then you have to go back to the East?’ asked Isabella.
‘Yes.’
‘And after the Japanese war is over – will you come back here then, to live?’
She asked him the question with gravity. His face, too, became grave.
‘It depends,’ he said, ‘on several things …’
There was a little unexplained pause … it was as though both of them were thinking of the same things. There was already full h
armony and understanding between them.
Then Isabella went away in search of Teresa, and Rupert St Loo sat down and began to talk to me. We talked shop and I enjoyed it. Since I had come to Polnorth House I had lived perforce in a feminine atmosphere. St Loo was one of those pockets in a country which remain consistently out of the war. Their connection with it is only by hearsay, gossip and rumours. Such soldiers as there are about are soldiers on leave who want to leave their war mentality behind them.
I had been plunged, instead, into a purely political world – and the political world, at any rate in places like St Loo, is essentially female. It is a world of calculation of effects, of persuasion, of a thousand small subtleties, coupled with that large amount of sheer uninteresting drudgery that is, again, the female quota to existence. It is a world in miniature – the outside universe of bloodshed and violence has its place only as a stage backcloth might have its place. Against the background of a world war not yet terminated we were engaged in a parochial and intensely personal struggle. The same thing was going on all over England camouflaged by noble clichés. Democracy, Freedom, Security, Empire, Nationalization, Loyalty, Brave New World – those were the words, the banners.
But the actual elections, as I began to suspect was always the case, were swayed by those personal insistencies which are so much greater, so much more urgent, than the Words and Names – the Banners – under which the fight is enrolled.
Which side will give me a house to live in? Which side will bring my boy Johnnie, my husband David back from overseas? Which side will give my babies the best chance in the future? Which side will keep further wars from taking and killing my man, and perhaps my sons?
Fine words butter no parsnips. Who will help me to reopen my shop? Who will build me a house? Who will give us all more food, more clothing coupons, more towels, more soap?
Churchill’s all right. He won the war for us. He saved us from having the Germans here. I’ll stick by Churchill.
Wilbraham’s a schoolmaster. Education’s the thing to get children on in the world. Labour will give us more houses. They say so. Churchill won’t bring the boys home as quickly. Nationalize the mines – then we’ll all have coal.
I like Major Gabriel. He’s a real man. He cares about things. He’s been wounded, he’s fought all over Europe, he hasn’t stayed at home in a safe job. He knows what we feel about the boys out there. He’s the kind we want – not a blasted schoolmaster. School teachers! Those evacuated teachers wouldn’t even help Mrs Polwidden to wash up the breakfast things. Stuck-up, that’s what they are.
What are politics after all but adjacent booths at the world’s fair, each offering their own cheapjack specific to cure all ills? … And the gullible public swallows the chatter.
That was the world I had lived in since I returned to life and began living it once more. It was a world I had never known before, a world entirely new to me.
At first I had despised it indulgently. I had characterized it to myself as just another racket. But now I was beginning to realize on what it was based, what passionate realities, what endless struggling hopes for survival. The woman’s world – not the man’s. Man was still the hunter – carefree, ragged, often hungry, pushing ahead, a woman and a child at his tail. No need for politics in that world, only the quick eyes, the ready hand, the stalking of the prey.
But the civilized world is based on earth, earth that grows and produces. That is a world that erects buildings, and fills them with possessions – a maternal, fecund world where survival is infinitely more complicated and may succeed and fail in a hundred different ways. Women do not see the stars, they see the four walls of a shelter from the wind, the cooking pot on the hearth, the faces of wellfed children asleep.
I wanted – badly – to escape from that female world. Robert was no help to me – he was a painter. An artist, maternally concerned with the bringing forth of new life. Gabriel was masculine enough – his presence had cut welcomely across the infinitesimal web of intrigue – but essentially he and I were out of sympathy.
With Rupert St Loo, I was back in my own world. The world of Alamein and Sicily, of Cairo and Rome. We talked the old language, in the old idiom, discovering mutual acquaintances. I was back again, a whole man, in the wartime careless world of imminent death, good cheer, and physical enjoyment.
I liked Rupert St Loo enormously. He was, I felt sure, a first-class officer, and he had an extremely attractive personality. He had brains, good humour, and a sensitive intelligence. He was the kind of man, I thought, who was needed to build up the new world. A man with traditions and yet with a modern and forward-looking mind.
Presently Teresa came and joined us, with Robert, and she explained how we were engaged in a fury of electioneering, and Rupert St Loo confessed that he wasn’t much of a politician: and then the Carslakes came in with Gabriel, and Mrs Carslake gushed, and Carslake put on his hearty manner, and was delighted to see Lord St Loo, and this was our candidate Major Gabriel.
Rupert St Loo and Gabriel greeted each other pleasantly and Rupert wished him luck and talked a little about the campaign and how things were going. They stood together outlined against the sunlight, and I noted the contrast, the really cruel contrast, between them. It wasn’t only that Rupert was handsome and Gabriel was an ugly little man – it went deeper than that. Rupert St Loo was poised, assured. He had a naturally courteous and kindly manner. You felt, too, that he was dead straight. A Chinese merchant, if I may put it that way, would have trusted him to take away any amount of goods without paying for them – and the Chinese merchant would have been right. Gabriel showed up badly against the other – he was nervous, too assertive, he straddled his legs and moved about uneasily. He looked, poor devil, rather a nasty common little man – worse, he looked the kind of man who would be honest as long as it paid him. He was like a dog of doubtful ancestry that has got along all right until it is brought into the show ring side by side with a thoroughbred.
Robert was standing by my couch, and I drew his attention to the two men with a mumbled word.
He caught my meaning and looked thoughtfully at them both. Gabriel was still weaving uneasily from foot to foot. He had to look up at Rupert as they talked, and I don’t think he liked having to do that.
Someone else was watching the two men – Isabella. Her eyes seemed at first to look at them both and then, unmistakably, they focused on Rupert. Her lips parted, she threw back her head proudly, a little colour crept up in her cheeks. That proud glad look of hers was a lovely thing to see.
Robert noticed her attitude by a quick glance. Then his eyes returned thoughtfully to Rupert St Loo’s face.
When the others went in for drinks, Robert stayed on the terrace – I asked him what he thought of Rupert St Loo. His answer was a curious one.
‘I should say,’ he said, ‘that there wasn’t a single bad fairy at his christening.’
Chapter Nineteen
Well, Rupert and Isabella didn’t take long to settle things. My own opinion is that it had been settled that very first moment when they met on the terrace by my chair.
There was, I think, an agonized relief on the part of both of them that the dream each had cherished secretly for so long had not let them down when it came to the testing.
For, as Rupert told me some days later, he had cherished a dream.
We had become fairly intimate, he and I. He, too, was glad of male society. The atmosphere of the castle was overloaded with feminine adoration. The three old ladies doted openly on Rupert, even Lady St Loo herself dropped some of her own particular astringent quality.
So Rupert liked coming across and talking to me.
‘I used to think,’ he said abruptly one day, ‘that I was a damned fool about Isabella. It’s curious, say what you like, to make up your mind you’re going to marry someone – when that someone is a child – and a scraggy child at that – and then find you don’t change your mind.’
I told him that I had known of
similar cases.
He said thoughtfully, ‘The truth of it is, I suppose, that Isabella and I belong … I’ve felt always that she’s a part of me, a part that I couldn’t get hold of yet, but that I’d have to get hold of some day to make things complete. Funny business. She’s an odd girl.’
He smoked a minute or two in silence and then said:
‘I think what I like best about her is that she’s got no sense of humour.’
‘You don’t think she has?’
‘None whatever. It’s wonderfully restful … I’ve always suspected that a sense of humour is a kind of parlour trick we civilized folk have taught ourselves as an insurance against disillusionment. We make a conscious effort to see things as funny, simply because we suspect they are unsatisfactory.’
Well, there was something in that … I thought about it with a slightly wry smile … Yes, Rupert St Loo had got something there.
He was staring out at the castle. He said jerkily:
‘I love that place. I’ve always loved it. Yet I’m glad I was brought up in New Zealand until the time I came over to Eton. It’s given me detachment. I can see the place from outside, as well as identifying myself with it without reflection. To come here from Eton for holidays, to know it was really mine, that some day I should live here – to recognize it, as it were, as something I had always wanted to have … to have the feeling – the first time I saw it – a queer eerie feeling – of coming home.
‘And Isabella was part of it. I was sure then and have been ever since that we would marry and live here for the rest of our mortal lives.’ His jaw set grimly. ‘And we will live here! In spite of taxation, and expenses and repairs – and the threat of land nationalization. That is our home, Isabella’s and mine.’
They were officially engaged on the fifth day after Rupert’s return.
It was Lady Tressilian who told us the news. It would be in The Times tomorrow, or the day after, she said, but she wanted us to hear of it first. And she was so very very happy about it all!
The Rose and the Yew Tree Page 14