Rosalie, in whose nature expediency was inherent, took the line of least resistance and remained at The Grove.
Lucy was a prisoner of war in Pretoria. His letters were very few and many weeks separated one of them from the next. Most of his own mail had failed to reach him: he knew nothing of Fred’s return to The Grove.
One day Rosalie asked Fred whether he had written to his brother.
Fred shook his head.
“I never write letters.”
“You and I can give Lucy all the news, such as it is,” observed Cecilia, unable to bear even the shadow of a criticism of her darling, “though goodness knows, poor boy, if he ever gets the letters.”
To Rosalie, her husband was acquiring a curious unreality. She wrote her letters, it seemed to her, into space—and the few that she received from him were drained of colour and life and never brought Lucy himself before her as a living personality.
It was Fred, so like Lucy externally, who was now part of her life, and the very fact that she did her utmost to avoid ever being left alone with him established a sort of complicity between them.
Rosalie had always lived in the present: the things and the people beside her were those to which her mind and heart vibrated. Memories, old fidelities, past emotions, could stir her in certain moods, but could never influence her course of action.
She was at once intelligent and simple. Her intelligence told her that to remain under the same roof with Fred, in the indefinitely prolonged absence of Lucy, was equivalent to a deliberate infidelity.
Her simplicity, which was perfectly genuine, allowed her to believe that she could safely live one day at a time, and that no crisis need ever supervene.
The winter weeks slid by almost imperceptibly. The news from South Africa was bad: then it was better again.
Fred came oftener to the schoolroom when Rosalie and Kate were sitting there over the fire, knitting for the troops, or playing with Callie. The baby adored him, and Fred was amused by her for hours. He played with her, and with his own spaniels, and he strummed on the piano, and turned over the pages of The Graphic and the Illustrated London News.
He became part of the routine pattern of their days.
Rosalie never knew at what moment the old craving rose in her, to find out whether or not Fred was still attracted by her.
She only knew that one day Fred was playing the tunes of the moment on the schoolroom piano, with Kate, holding Callie on her lap, sitting near him and every now and then speaking—and the next day, as it seemed, he was still playing the same cheap, catch-penny airs and was looking straight into her own eyes as he did so, and the flame that she had believed to be extinguished and cold had flared up again between them, strong and alive and devouring.
Chapter VIII
(1)
Kate lay awake, and wondered what was wrong.
It wasn’t only that she herself wasn’t happy, although she ought to be happy—as her mother sharply and frequently told her. It was morbid, schoolgirl nonsense to be going about with a discontented expression when one’s brother was safely home again, and the war over, and one had a happy home such as many a girl would envy, said Cecilia.
But was it a happy home?
Kate thought that The Grove, in some mysterious way, was altering.
There was something wrong, and she knew that it concerned Rosalie, and therefore Lucy. The two people whom she loved most in the world—although neither of them, she reminded herself with young, self-torturing bitterness, loved her most in the world.
Lucy had been home for more than a month now.
He seemed older and graver—but then he’d been at the war, and a prisoner in Pretoria.
Rosalie wasn’t radiantly happy, as Kate had thought she would be when Lucy came home again. She spent more time with little Callie, and less with Lucy, than she had before he went away.
And something was wrong between Fred and Lucy.
They no longer shared jokes together, or spent hours in a companionable silence, whilst Lucy pottered about in his workshop and Fred smoked one cigar after another.
It seemed to Kate that they actually avoided one another, and yet she repeatedly told herself that that must be imagination. Fred and Lucy had always been friends, and liked one another’s company. Besides, things like family feuds didn’t happen except in books, Kate told herself confusedly. They couldn’t happen in one’s own family.
Rosalie went up to St. Brinvels nearly every day. Her mother’s health had suddenly begun to fail, and there was talk of an operation. Then Mrs. Troyle appeared, overbore her sister’s fretful, pitiful protests and declared that she must come up to London, consult a specialist, and if necessary go into a nursing-home.
As usual, she carried her point.
Talkative and managing, she arranged everything and Rosalie went to stay with her father for a few days, leaving Callie and the nurse at The Grove.
Lucy drove her over, and came back, and was grave and silent and scarcely spoke to anyone.
“Is Rosalie’s mother very ill?” Kate asked him.
She hoped that he would say yes, because then Mrs. Meredith’s illness might be made to account for everything.
But Lucy said that he didn’t know. Mrs. Meredith had certainly lost weight and complained of pain—but there might not be anything very seriously wrong. The specialist would be able to tell them.
“It’s very worrying for Rosalie.”
“It is,” agreed Lucy non-committally.
That night after dinner Lucy asked his brother a question, causing Kate to realize in a sick flash what a long while it was since she had heard him address Fred directly.
“When are you going back to Bridgetown?”
“Any time now,” said Fred.
“Is your passage booked?”
Fred, instead of answering, whistled a bar or two of his favourite “Maimie O’Rorke” and Cecilia replied for him.
“There’s no need for Fred to go back until he wants to, or at all. I’m only too thankful to have him at home, and Johnny Newton is out there.”
“By all accounts, Johnny Newton isn’t doing anything at all except drink, and the plantations are going to blazes.”
“Johnny can’t prevent hurricanes, any more than anybody else,” Cecilia said in an offended voice. “Still, I’m looking out for another man. Fred thinks I ought to do that.”
“You’d better send me, Mama,” said Lucy.
Kate, startled and dismayed, glanced from one face to the other. Lucy’s was dark, his expression set and lowering. Fred was looking at him, too, with a curious half-smile. Cecilia wore the air of arrogant surprise that her children knew well, always adopted at the slightest hint of even the most indirect criticism.
“I shouldn’t think of doing such a thing, my dear boy. You know nothing about it for one thing, and besides, I want you here.”
“Let Fred stay here. He seems very well established.”
Cecilia laughed a little.
“Don’t be ridiculous, my dear Lucy. This is Fred’s home, and yours, and you can both stay here, for that matter. I never wanted either of you to go away. In fact, I should have said that your duty lay with your mother, in what are probably the last few years of her life.”
“Rubbish, Mama,” said Fred.
She smiled at him, well pleased, but continued to address Lucy in a tone of indulgent admonishment.
“You talk a great deal of nonsense, my dear. Pray do you propose to take poor Rosalie and Callie out to live in the West Indies?”
“Certainly I do. You spent a good many years out there yourself, Mama, and so did your children, and no one was any the worse for it, so far as I know.”
“Oh, Lucy, no! Don’t do that!” cried Kate.
“Of course he won’t do that,” her mother retorted. “I shouldn’t dream of such a thing. I really don’t know what’s come over you, Lucy—and it’s hardly the moment for suggestions of that kind, however lightly made, with Rosalie�
��s mother ill as she is, poor thing.”
Lucy said nothing more, except “Very well, Mama”—but Kate knew that he had not made his suggestion lightly. She wished that she dared speak to him about it again, but she felt afraid—not that he might resent her question, but that he might in some way confirm her vague fear and anxiety.
News came to St. Brinvels that Mrs. Meredith was to undergo an operation—a very serious one, to which no one gave a name—and Lucy and his wife went up to London with John Meredith, to a hotel near the nursing-home.
Kate spent most of her days with little Callie. She often persuaded the nurse to stay at home with her sewing in the afternoons while she herself pushed the light cane go-cart down to the village, to fetch the second post from the post-office, Callie sometimes trotting beside her, but more often seated in the little chair on wheels, her big round eyes dancing, her hands, encased in blue woollen gloves, waving about.
She was a gay, friendly baby, forward in speech and more animated than any of Fanny’s children had been at the same age.
Kate wrote daily to Rosalie, making Callie the excuse. In reality she felt a miserable anxiety, and an urgent need to express her still undisciplined affection in words that, she knew dimly, would never convey the feelings that prompted them.
Rosalie’s replies, which were few, were as they had always been—affectionate and inadequate. Kate, reading the brief scrawls over and over again, knew that Rosalie wrote in loving phrases because she could never bear to hurt or disappoint anyone, and because she was too sympathetic not to realize something of Kate’s ardent longing for response. She knew also that once Rosalie had written and posted one of her little notes any real remembrance of the recipient left her mind. Her thoughts, unlike Kate’s own, would never bridge time or distance, although her affections, dormant in absence, would revive in a renewed contact.
But of course, Rosalie was only thinking of her mother now, Kate told herself—and she had Lucy to comfort her.
Kate felt ashamed of the fantasy in which she sometimes indulged, of Rosalie sending for her—saying that she wanted her.
“I’d go,” thought Kate, “however much Mama forbade it—and I expect she would.”
In her heart she knew that it was only a schoolgirl dream, and that Rosalie who had once light-heartedly called Kate her greatest friend in the world, had forgotten now that she had ever said such a thing and, had she remembered, would have smiled as at a recollection of childhood.
Rosalie had moved immeasurably far away, into adult life.
Kate was sufficiently honest to admit that she herself had remained emotionally static, imprisoned still in the turbulent miseries and insecurities of adolescence. On the last day of July she was on her way to the village as usual when she met the telegraph-boy coming up to The Grove.
The orange envelope that he carried was addressed to her mother, and Kate would not have dared to open it but the boy informed her of the contents unasked.
Mrs. Meredith had died upon the operating-table.
(2)
Rosalie, pale and dimmed, came home again. She remained with her father at St. Brinvels until after the funeral, but Lucy returned to The Grove.
Both he and Fred attended the funeral, where mounds of flowers and an elaborate panoply of mourning seemed to impose upon the dead woman an importance that her pale, flaccid personality had never possessed in life.
Cecilia, who held to the convention that women should not be present on such occasions, sent her carriage. It brought Rosalie, Fred and Lucy back again. Throughout the long drive none of the three spoke a single word.
“Now, dear, about plans,” said Cecilia to her daughter-in-law one evening a week later. “Would your father care to come down here for a few days—just to make a break?”
Rosalie shook her head.
“Thank you very much indeed. He won’t move from home. After all, he’s always got something to do there.”
“Yes, that’s certainly a great help,” assented Cecilia with a deep sigh. “I found it so when dear Papa left us. I shall never forget how I worked.”
The remark, which had no foundation in fact, was too characteristic of Cecilia to elicit even a conventional reply from anyone.
“After all, you can go up there as often as you want to, and he will find an interest in Callie as she grows older. What a comfort that you’re settled so near!” Cecilia said.
The atmosphere in the room grew tense.
Lucy, sitting behind a newspaper, was completely motionless.
Rosalie turned paler than before and twisted her rings round and round on her slim fingers.
Fred, without turning his head, glanced first at his brother and then at Cecilia herself and his lips formed themselves into the shape of a whistle but no sound came from them.
Only Kate, pasting pictures into a scrap-album at the centre table, looked up from her work with startled eyes at each person in turn, as though expecting one or other to speak.
No one did.
Cecilia, alone, seeming entirely unaware of strain, moved and spoke quite normally.
She made a casual remark concerning the heat of the room, and Lucy—as though released from a spell—got up and set open one of the windows behind its heavy brocade curtain.
“Isn’t it a full moon?” asked his mother.
“Not quite. It will be, in two nights from now,” Lucy answered.
(3)
Two nights later, as Lucy had said, the moon was full—a brilliant golden globe hanging above a motionless, soundless world.
They sat out on the terrace after dinner—Cecilia and her sons and daughter, and Rosalie. There had been very little conversation, and Kate noticed that Lucy had only once broken silence, to ask Rosalie if he should fetch her a wrap from the hall.
“Are you cold, my dear?” Cecilia asked her daughter-in-law, astonished—for the night was a breathlessly hot one.
“No,” said Rosalie.
“You shivered,” remarked Fred unexpectedly.
So he, too, had been watching Rosalie. It was odd, thought Kate vaguely, for Fred was not observant, as Lucy was.
Rosalie laughed—a strange, nervous little laugh.
“I think a goose must have been walking over my grave.”
Soon afterward she said that she was rather tired, and would go up to bed.
Fred and Lucy both rose as she got up.
Don’t move, please,” said Rosalie. “Goodnight.”
Kate and Cecilia replied. The two men kept silence.
Neither of them walked with her to the house.
Kate, who was still sent to bed at ten o’clock by her mother, heard the hour strike on the church clock in the village, and repeated in a variety of chimes from within the house.
She felt reluctant to stir.
“Run along, Kate,” said Cecilia’s inexorable voice.
She had to go.
Indoors, it was as hot and as silent as it had been on the terrace.
Kate climbed the wide, shallow stairs slowly. Outside the door of the big front bedroom she stopped, hesitated, and then knocked.
“Come in!”
Rosalie had taken off her thin black crape evening dress, and her pale gold hair had been unpinned and hung over her white wrapper. Beside the double bed stood Callie’s cane crib, with the baby asleep within it.
“Is she sleeping in here?” asked Kate, surprised.
“It was so hot in the night-nursery—it gets the sun full on it all the afternoon. I made Nurse help me carry the cot down here just now.”
“Did Callie wake up?”
Rosalie shook her head.
They looked down at the soft baby face, placid and flushed with pink.
“Isn’t she a darling?” half-whispered Kate.
Rosalie, motionless, hung over the cot.
When she straightened herself again and turned round Kate saw with relief that she was smiling.
“She’s very good, isn’t she? You know, she har
dly ever cries. Were Fanny’s children as good as that?”
“Good gracious, no,” said Kate. “Cecil cried a lot when he was teething, and Awdry never would go to sleep in the daytime and always seemed to wake up at crack of dawn. She didn’t cry, but you could hear her shouting all over the house—just for fun. Still, she was sweet. They all are.”
“You love babies, don’t you? You’ll adore your own.”
“I expect I shall,” said Kate. “But I do sometimes wish I could have babies without having to have a husband too.”
“You’ve never been in love.”
“I suppose I haven’t,” said Kate. And she added thoughtfully: “I can imagine falling in love, you know—but I can’t imagine anybody falling in love with me”
Directly she had spoken the words, that sounded so childish, she realized that they represented a belief that had, unawares, become a fundamental part of her outlook upon life.
Obscurely frightened, she looked at Rosalie in the hope of reassurance and saw that Rosalie had not even heard her. Her thoughts were far away.
Kate knew the familiar pang of disappointment, but with it was mingled a sense of relief.
Rosalie moved across the big room, away from the sleeping child.
“You must go to bed, darling,” she said to Kate.
“If Mama knows you’re here, she won’t be pleased.”
“She won’t know. She always goes up to her room at eleven, never before, and she doesn’t ever come along the schoolroom passage, or anywhere near my room. I hear her shut her door, every night. And then, hours later, I hear Fred go past.”
“Does it wake you up?”
“Sometimes I’m not asleep. I read in bed, but of course Mama doesn’t know that.”
“Well, you’re not a child any longer,” said Rosalie.
There was a pause.
“Kate, if Lucy really does want to go to Barbados in Fred’s place, couldn’t you come with us?”
Kate, unspeakably astonished, gazed at her.
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