It was his turn to be quiet. And when she asked what was the matter he said, “Do you really want to know what I am thinking?”
“If you know yourself, why then, yes!”
“I think you should marry Bay.”
She flushed; she said, “Aren’t you being rather impertinent?”
“I didn’t mean to be. But I am concerned about you, Sophy; as you have been about me. Isn’t that being friends?”
He felt himself to be twangy, and sought the idea of an excuse to leave. When she spoke again she looked less shaky, and, obviously trying to recover herself, said, “Has the story of the mouse appeared in the Royal Magazine yet? I’ve been looking out for it. It’s one of your best.”
He told her of the two letters Anders Norse had shown him in the basement office in Adelphi Terrace.
“How absurd! Why are you being ‘selfish’ by writing such stories? That one about the mouse is real, about a true countryman! But I suppose it is the commercial attitude that demands sentimentality writ large. Then you haven’t sold any more to the American magazines?”
“No. I’ve written about twenty in all, and they don’t want them. My book of essays hasn’t sold, either—about a hundred and twenty copies.”
“I lent it to Bay. He likes your country writing.”
“But ‘not the novels’?”
“Well, I suppose like most normal people, he reads seldom, and when he does, he wants to read only about what one calls ‘our class’.”
“Bay told me the other day that his favourite author was Edgar Wallace, who writes almost exclusively of the class of people known as lags, screws, bogies and squealers.”
Sophy measured out kibbled grain for the ducks from the bin.
“Don’t be perverse, child,” she said, winningly. “You’re just being all the time a very naughty little thing! What you need is a good spanking!”
Annabelle’s riding saddle and bridle were hanging, neat, soaped, and burnished, on the third peg from the door. What delight if in that little room it had been Annabelle beside him, asking him to kiss her! Did Annabelle see his lips quiver, his eyes fearful of rebuff, as Sophy’s now?
“Don’t be unkind to me, I can’t bear it,” said Sophy. She looked most unhappy. He forced himself to kiss her on the cheek, she turned her mouth to his; and that night she went into his room.
*
One afternoon he was sitting in the Blue Room, with its tester bed, tapestries, Aubusson carpet, white-tiled bathroom leading off through one door, and dressing-room through another. A decanter of whisky with a syphon of soda stood on his bedhead table, with four books. In the past month he had not opened the books nor removed the stopper of the decanter.
Every morning he had gone up to his room, to sit at the leather-topped table by the wall. Day after day he had tried to get on with his new novel, which now had a dozen and more opening chapters, each a variation of the one before it. He paced the room, lit cigarettes, stared through the window with its unmoving view of willow trees and swans on the lake. Peacocks sometimes walked on the nearer lawns, or flew into the great cedar below the terrace.
April 13. Sophy considers that my nature has not yet awakened. This is because, when she asks me why I don’t want to take off my pyjamas (she strips off her nightgown after putting out the light in my room) and I reply that I am cold, she does not apparently see that it is an excuse. She offers to ‘cuddle’ me, and I have to pretend. In fact, all my exterior living is a lie: I am compelled by social need to put on ‘protective colouration’. If I could leave without hurting her feelings I would do so at this moment; from all aspects I do not belong to the world of these people.
Yesterday I asked her a question, while we were in the garden—genuinely seeking information—“Do women have some sort of sensual satisfaction when suckling a baby?” She flushed, and was silent. When I persisted, she said, “I haven’t any idea, and if I did know, I should not tell you.” I felt anger rising in me, coldly: but I said, as though ‘innocently’, “I suppose the social whirl of pre-war days, when wet-nurses were usual, tended to make women live unnatural lives?” “You are the last person to talk about being unnatural!” she retorted. I laughed, and she said, “Before I let you make love to me again, you’ll have to crawl!” I wanted to leave there and then, but I must at least wait until Annabelle returns in two days’ time, to say goodbye to her.
He was putting the book in the drawer of the writing table when there came a slight knock on the door. He went to open it. Annabelle stood there.
“Hullo,” she said softly. “Am I disturbing the Brain?”
“Where did you spring from? I thought you were coming back——”
“I came back early.”
Annabelle hesitated. Her hair was plaited and tied up in two door-knockers, with red ribbon, as when he had first seen her.
“Care for a knock up?” asked Annabelle, raising her eyebrows slightly. She stood still, her heels together. She wore a new white dress, and white silk stockings. She held a racquet and red string-bag of tennis balls in her hand.
“I’ll change, and be down in a minute,” Phillip said, adding, “I’m not much good on a hard court.”
“The grass court is all right. They cut it and rolled it this morning. It’s quite dry now, I’ve just been to look,” said Annabelle, a little breathlessly.
*
The grass was beginning to grow in the worn-out turf of the park, and the fallow deer among the oaks and chestnuts were grazing with the ponies and hunters. They played a fast hard set, and then another set, and now they were resting on the grass. He felt the sun warm on his face, on all his body. He stroked a daisy growing at the corner of the tennis court, which the knives of the mower had spared. He lay on his elbow on the grass, not looking at Annabelle as she sat cross-legged, white skirt stretched over knees, hands in lap, looking at him.
To Phillip it seemed that the tender sunshine was floating him in its happiness, flowing into him and buoying his heart with a joy that was almost unbearable in its dreamlike quality. As in a dream he heard his voice speaking of the daisy, which was himself, quiveringly strong and happy in the sunshine of love.
“I’ll pick it,” said Annabelle, challenging him with her eyes.
“No, no,” his voice pleaded. “It is so happy. Think, Annabelle—the winter—and now it has risen—to the sun-god——”
Annabelle was no longer mocking; Annabelle felt as he was feeling, the sunshine and he and the daisy and Annabelle were one now. Her eyes were tender, her face was glowing with an inner light. Her lips were parted, she was smiling without knowing she smiled, she was looking at him and he was looking at her, and they were both breathing quickly in the warm sunshine. He dared not speak. He dared not move. He dared not look at Annabelle’s eyes now.
Annabelle had been one of the champion players at her school, and he had beaten her. She had challenged him to another set. His back-hand top-spin drives had whipped an inch over the net, and zipped an inch or two inside the back line; his cannon-ball service had been even faster, making her grin and skip out of the way. He had leapt into the air, and smashed most of her returns at the volley. Usually he was an erratic player. Annabelle had laughed much during this performance.
“Do you usually pull your shirt-tails right out of your trousers, Phil?”
They sat on the grass, in the sunshine, while a nightingale, one of the first to arrive, sang by the lake.
“I promised Mummie I’d feed the ducks for her. Come and help me.”
Annabelle said it sleepily, while continuing to stare at the grass. Then she was looking at him, smiling, her teeth so even and white; and suddenly she was caught up in a wild tomboy mood. She ruffled his hair. He caught her and they wrestled, she very strong, he not wishing to withstand her. He chased her until she begged for mercy. A gardener appeared, and sedately they walked to the feeding of the ducks. In the harness room, standing under peg No. 3, where her polished gear was hanging, he watc
hed her mixing the feed for the ducklings which called weep-weep-weep in yellow strings issuing from or going into three coops wherein anxious hens peered and clucked. He kept still: silence was divine. She came to him and, as he stood looking on the red-tiled floor, she remained still beside him, a strangely subdued Annabelle. She put her hand through his arm, as though appealing for protection, a home for her troubled spirit. He said, “Do you dampen the feed before giving it to the ducklings?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll do it—I know where that rusty old tap is,” and taking the pail, he went to the tap under the yew-tree round the corner of the coach-house. When he came back she was standing inside the harness room, and called out,
“Phil! Please come here.”
“I must feed the ducklings! See how hungry they are.”
“I haven’t mixed it right.”
“Oh, yes, you have, I watched your mother doing it many times.”
“Come here, I want to tell you something. Oh, very well, go and be damned to you!”
Carefully he fed the ducklings, feeling a wild elation within his pain when she came and stood abstractedly beside him. “Help me wash out the bowl.”
“I’ll do it, don’t you bother. You mustn’t get your frock spoiled,” and he moved away, pretending to be anxious to help all he could. Round the corner, out of sight by the tap, he hopped, and cracked his fingers; then a stillness came upon him, for Annabelle’s love, if it was love, and surely, surely she was now love itself, had come too late.
Back on the grass again, they played another set, another wild and merry game of tennis. Sophy and the General had gone to London for the day. It was sweet to sit again on the lawn, Annabelle in her white tennis frock, to see her lustrous dark hair uncoiling softly, rich with life, as his fingers took off the ribbons and pulled apart the plaits. Annabelle shook her hair free, and then she was looking at him, Beauty itself in her face and eyes. He thought of Blake’s poem:
Never seek to tell thy love
Love that never told can be,
For the gentle wind doth move,
Silently, invisibly
and bowed his head before Annabelle’s love, beside the daisy quivering and glowing with brilliant life.
“Phillip!”
He dared not look at Annabelle, so strangely and softly had his name floated on the air to him. She moved beside him, and he could see the quick movement of breathing in her throat and breast. He touched the daisy.
“You seem to prefer it to me,” said Annabelle, very softly.
“Ah, it is so happy, Annabelle. It is you—it is me.”
“Pick it for me!”
He shook his head.
“Then I’ll pull the damned thing off its roots.”
She did not move. Her hand touched his. Her fingers took his hand. A kingfisher flashed by, crying a sharp note. He got up, saying, “I must try and find its nest in the steep bank of gravel, over there.”
“Please Phillip——” said Annabelle, sitting on the grass beside the daisy. He went back to her.
“I want you to talk to me.”
“I’ll only bore you.”
“You won’t, Phillip. Come here.”
He walked away, sad with a piercing joy. By the lake the ripples burned with broken sun-reflections. Through lashes of eyes nearly closed they were swans flying there, phoenix-swans flighting beyond the song and glory of life. Poetry was the ultimate triumph of life over death, the ultimate justification for life. He looked back: Annabelle was walking slowly towards the terrace of the house.
By the lake it was calm and he lay in the sun while the shadow of the weeping willow tree shifted and lengthened on the grass. Moorhens croaked, and paddled in the wavelets; swallows flew low in the late afternoon, dipping and hovering over the water. He felt forlorn.
*
The black Daimler limousine glided with tyres crackling on the gravel drive, and slowed up at the stone entrance porch, with its keystone ensculped in the head of a wolf, its tongue pierced by an arrow, crest of a defeated family whose home had been bought by the trustees of the estate of Sophy’s grandfather, a rich merchant of the City of London.
“Hullo, enjoyed yourself?” asked Sophy, getting out of the car. She did not look at Phillip. The General went into the house, after a wave of the hand, and a “Hullo, Maddison, had some tennis?” The chauffeur drove the car round to the garage. Sophy remained.
“Yes, it’s been a lovely day.”
“Where’s Annabelle?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her for three hours or more. Have you had a good day?”
“Yes, thanks. I’ve bought the tickets for the Easter trip to the Pyrénées. Have you been doing any writing?”
“Oh, are you going to the Pyrénées?” He felt a pang that he was left out. “Yes, I’ve done some work of sorts.”
“We’re going there for Easter, with Bay and Cynthia, before leaving the two girls to be finished in Paris. The Talbots are coming. Young Brian Talbot is Annabelle’s beau, you know.”
The arrow flew out of the stone, piercing his tongue.
*
Annabelle was silent, abstracted, during dinner, and afterwards she scarcely spoke. Phillip, too, was silent, searching for and reading Tennyson’s songs in The Princess.
“You’re tired, dear, go to bed,” said Sophy. Annabelle’s sight was unfixed.
“Oh, I left my tennis racquet on the lawn,” she said.
“I’ll go and get it for you,” Phillip said.
“I’ll go,” said Annabelle. “It’s rather hot in here.”
“You shouldn’t go out, dear.”
“I’ll get a coat, Mother.”
Annabelle went to get a coat, and Phillip opened the french windows for her and walked with her across the terrace, in the clear starlit night: he had made up his mind to say he would leave the next day. As he stood looking up at the sky he saw a bluish-white streak. He had just been reading
Now slides the silent meteor on and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.
The pallor of Annabelle’s gown under her coat showed in the darkness. She put her arm in Phillip’s, and they walked to the lake unspeaking, and then back again.
“Don’t go in there, come in the other way, I must talk to you,” she whispered. He hesitated. She held his arm. “Please come.”
She pulled him away from the french windows. They entered by the porch under the wolf’s head, through the heavy oak-and-iron door. A light burned in the lobby.
“Your racquet strings are damp. I’ll run up and get a towel.”
“Phillip!”
“Yes?”
“Is it Cynthia Gotley? I mean—do you——”
He scarcely knew what he was doing. He put the racquet down on a chest. Their arms hung at their sides. Her fingers touched his fingers, held them lightly, she leaned to him, her face like a sleep-walker’s, they kissed, his arms were round Annabelle, and her arms round him and their lips sought each other again.
“Oh, Annabelle, do you——?”
“Yes,” she breathed. “Don’t tell anyone, will you?” and with eyes averted she breathed goodnight and ran upstairs.
He opened the heavy door and walked by the lake. Returning later to his room he sat down and with a safety-razor blade cut the pages containing intimate details about Sophy and himself from his journal and burned them. Then he wrote a letter to Sophy, thanking her for all she had done for him and saying he had to go away and would write to her later about his things. After this a note to Annabelle, with a quotation from Lovelace’s poem to Lucasta slipped under her bedroom door. Returning to his room he hesitated: it was not true that he was leaving because of a question of honour, anyway he hadn’t any honour. He went back to her room and creeping in, withdrew the note.
The stable clock struck four. Tip-toeing down the stairs with his bag he let himself out. The dawn was chilly, he ran and walked round the lake, hearing the cries of coo
ts and moorfowl in its middle, and when he made his way to the coach-house the eastern sky was becoming pink. Wheeling out the Norton—bag strapped to carrier, driving belt removed—he walked the machine past the house and down the drive until he was beyond the lodge—then away to the Gravesend ferry and the Thames estuary gleaming with sunrise.
Part Four
BARLEY
“True love is likeness of thought.”
Richard Jefferies in
Amaryllis at the Fair
Chapter 19
TO THE MOUNTAINS
On the second day after leaving Essex, Phillip bought at a second-hand bookshop in London a copy of Amaryllis at the Fair, by Richard Jefferies; and glancing through it, found a sentence that made the cause of the confusions of the past immediately clear. True love is likeness of thought.
Only people who saw and felt the same way about things could share a true life. That was a law of nature: wren with wren, owl with owl, moth with moth. Recognition of oneself in another! A hybrid likeness would cause—puzzlement. Spica and himself were only partly alike. Julian and he were unalike. Willie and he saw the same perspectives. Annabelle, Sophy, himself—each had been lonely, the more thereby longing to find fullness of life in another.
And yet he ached when he thought of Annabelle, who soon, with Sophy and all the others, would be leaving England for the Pyrénées.
Young Brian Talbot is Annabelle’s beau, you know.
Ah, perhaps he could go and see Irene and Barley, and make that an excuse for going to see the Selby-Lloyds. How far was Argelès Gazost—he had written the name in his pocket diary—from Laruns? If only he had a map.
Calling at the office of The Daily Crusader that morning he saw Martin Beausire, the literary critic, and mentioning the Pyrénées, was told that Rowley Meek, sitting in the next room, was the man to ask.
“He knows the Pyrénées like the back of his hand. Rowley and Bevan are planning to walk in the mountains this Easter.”
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