A Man of Forty

by Gerald Bullet

  “I’m an awful old sweet tooth if that’s what you mean,” said Lily, defensively.

  Miss Camshaw, standing above her where she sat, laid a trembling hand on the girl’s hair. “ We are friends, aren’t we, Lily?”

  Lily, embarrassed, answered nervously : “ Of course, Edith.”

  “We haven’t any secrets from each other, have we?”

  Lily swallowed, smiled awkwardly, and answered something inaudible.

  “If ever you were in trouble, darling, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”

  “Well . . “ said Lily. “ That would depend, I expect. Don’t you?”

  She was alarmed by the tragic expression on Miss Camshaw’s face, and an obscure instinct told her that this, at all events, was no time for confiding in her.

  “Depend?” Miss Camshaw echoed, almost fearfully. “ On what?”

  Wanting to explain, yet knowing that to do so would give herself away, the girl chose an uneasy compromise.

  “Well, you’re funny about some things, aren’t you?”

  “What do you mean, Lily?”

  “Oh nothing! Let’s drop it, shall we? I’m ever so thirsty Aren’t you?” She picked up her teacup and drank.

  “What do you mean?” repeated Miss Camshaw, in a tense whisper. “ Don’t torture me, child. Do you mean you don’t like me?”

  Torture her! Really, thought Lily, that’s coming it a bit thick! “ Of course I do,” she said impatiently. “ But a person can’t always be saying so. It sounds so soppy. Why can’t we sit down and have our tea in peace and quiet?”

  Miss Camshaw, without answering, moved away from her and sank wearily into a chair.

  After a strained silence Lily said : “ I’m ever so sorry I got cross.”

  “It was my own fault,” said Miss Camshaw.

  “Let’s forgive and forget,” suggested Lily, with a cheerful grin.

  “It’s simply that you don’t understand,” said Miss Camshaw.

  It sounded like an accusation. “ What don’t I understand?”

  “You don’t understand how much you mean to me, child. I want to ... to take care of you… keep you safe ... all to myself.”

  Oh lawks, there she goes again!

  “There’s the world, like a horned beast, waiting to pounce on you, darling.” A note of shrillness came into her voice. “ And you’re all I’ve got!”

  Lily put down her teacup, wiped her mouth with three inches of handkerchief, and got up from the table, saying she really must be going now.

  “Going?”

  Yes, said Lily : she was ever so sorry, but she’d got a date. Went clean out of her head it did. Funny how you forgot things, wasn’t it? She’d got to meet a friend at six o’clock, and it was half-past five already. It just showed how time flew, didn’t it?”

  “You’re meeting a friend?” said Miss Camshaw, her eyes glittering. “ What friend? Where?”

  “I expect that’s my business, don’t you?” said Lily. She gave a quick smile, not wanting to be cruel. Already she was at the door, saying with a kind of gasp : “ Thanks ever so much for taking me out.”

  She saw Edith’s wild stare, saw her cover her face with her hands, and then looked no more. Hurrying down the stairs—four flights of them—Lily felt like some small animal escaping from a cage. Then, safe in the street—coo, she is funny, thought Lily. She can get me the sack if she likes : I don’t care. I won’t be owned by anybody. Not owned I won’t. Not, said Lily, till Mr. Right turns up, any old how.

  § 4

  The daffodils on David’s lawn were long over, though two or three blooms of tattered silk remained flagging on their dry stalks, to keep him in mind of the vanished glory. This Sunday of complicated tensions and anxieties had begun radiantly : sky blazing, trees sighing and swaying, a brisk breeze blowing in warm waves against one’s face. It was one of those happy surprises with which England occasionally indulges and delights her children : a midsummer day born weeks before its time. David and Adam came back from their morning walk declaring to each other that they had too many clothes on : neither the one nor the other, in spite of his preoccupation, could resist the pleasure of the sun : neither Adam, who indeed had little reason to do so, nor David with his load of delight and anxiety. At noon the wind died down, except for an occasional boisterous puff which, as though it had somehow become detached from the main body of commotion, arrived at intervals, round some invisible corner, to rustle the young leaves and send a shallow ripple travelling over the uncut grass of the paddock.

  Even Lydia, when for one grudged moment she relaxed her grip on the idea consuming her, could not help being aware of this radiant, impersonal, quickening presence; though she, stubborn to remember her bereavement, saw in the newborn summertime a device by which to make her private misery the darker. The world was alive and beautiful, but she was desolate and unloved. No woman, since the world began, was ever so much despised as she, or so much deserving, to be despised : this was Lydia’s verdict on herself. She found a savage pleasure, or a momentary distraction from pain, in mortifying herself, in abasing and deriding herself. A dull drab woman (she insisted), whom no man could bring himself to love; yet it was equally part of her conception that by not seeing her as infinitely desirable David had proved himself a shallow creature, a blind man, unworthy of the treasures—the sympathy, the understanding, above all the unwavering, faithful-unto-death devotion—which she had lavished upon him. In what had she fallen short? How had she failed in her duty?

  Lydia sat, alone for the most part, working with a curiously intent industry on a piece of elaborate embroidery begun and abandoned years ago : alone, because though others were at liberty to join her in this room, a room in common and general use, they soon drifted away again in face of her unresponsiveness. With anyone who addressed her, particularly with Adam the guest, she would make carefully normal conversation. But the embroidery gave her a pretext—so David felt—for keeping her glance averted, lest strange and terrible things should be legible there. Everyone—even Eleanor, even Adam—was conscious in some degree of the silence in her, a silence which seemed somehow to accompany, and to subdue to its own livid pallor, her small careful speeches. She did not give the impression of sulking, but rather of abstraction; nor of behaving according to plan, but rather of defending herself, instinctively, against some mysterious danger she discerned in free, unguarded friendliness. It was as if she was resolved to give nothing away—least of all anything of herself.

  The drowsy warmth of the afternoon encouraged the party to break up after lunch, each going his own way. Even Adam was in no mood for further talk : he found his thoughts sufficiently amusing. It would have suited his present fancy to borrow the car and take himself for a solitary ride, but being pretty sure that any such suggestion on his part would be countered by an offer of company, he retired to his bedroom with two Sunday papers and a book taken from David’s study-table. The book was one that David happened to be reading, and David, half an hour later, was vaguely puzzled to find it no longer where he remembered leaving it. He mentioned the loss to Lydia, glad to be provided with a remark so colourless and common-place. She answered, briefly, that she knew nothing about it.

  “If I were you I should ask Eleanor,” she said.

  “Where is Eleanor? In the garden?”

  “It’s quite likely,” said Lydia. “ I don’t know.”

  After a nervous pause, David spoke again.

  “ What we said the other night, Lydia ... I feel it was perhaps a bit premature.” The sight of her angry smile made him add, self-defensively : “ Decisions on that scale can’t be taken in a moment. It’s absurd.”

  “ Do you mean you’ve changed your mind?” said Lydia, suddenly still.

  “I mean…” He hesitated, afraid of committing himself. “ This smashing-up, it’s so… inhuman. I feel there must be some middle way, some civilized way, if only we can give ourselves time to find it.”

  “What do you propose?” Lydi
a asked coldly.

  He knew that she found his vacillations contemptible. And he agreed with that verdict. “ I don’t know—yet. But I know you oughtn’t to rush things.”

  “I see,” said Lydia. “ You prefer to keep me on the rack. Very well, David.”

  He shrugged his shoulders, staring down at her bent head. It was useless to talk to her while she was in this mood. He recognized, moreover, that a parade of his indecision would neither advance his own position nor alleviate the discomfort of hers : Well, I’ll have a look at the paper, he said to himself, seeking refuge in anti-climax. Edging out of the room he went into the garden, vaguely intending to look for Eleanor, who might know where the paper was, and would perhaps help him to find the lost book.

  Yes, there was Eleanor, sitting in a garden chair on the smaller lawn, a green plat sheltered on three sides by a hornbeam hedge; but instead of going over to speak to her he fetched hoe and trowel from his toolshed and retired to another part of the garden, to do, as he promised himself, a bit of weeding. There was plenty of it to be done, and it was a job he found soothing to a troubled spirit. He had nothing to say to Eleanor, having completely forgotten about the book, and being half-afraid that it might some time, any time, come into Eleanor’s vague head to question him about Lydia. Today had been worth while for David, because he had seen Mary : that was his simple criterion. He sometimes felt that if it could be arranged that he might look on Mary’s beauty every day, if only for a moment, he could live on to a ripe old age in something approaching contentment. But when he was in Mary’s presence his demands of fate were not so modest. David was now in an impossible condition : he was utterly possessed by his worship of Mary and utterly possessed by his anxiety concerning Lydia. The two absolutes existed side by side, neither yielding to the other : it was almost like being two men.

  Eleanor, catching a glimpse of David in the distance, hoped it would not occur to him to come and talk to her about Lydia, or indeed about anything. Today she was obscurely afraid of everyone in the house except Paul, though she did not quite know why. She had a book in her lap, but seldom looked at it. This warm afternoon was like a lover to her : she closed her eyes and sat back in her chair, lazily enjoying the soft caresses and murmuring voice of summer. Birds chirruped and fluttered in the hedge that sheltered her. In the distance a cuckoo called : a strange unbirdlike call (two hollow notes played on a wooden pipe) that for a moment made everything unreal, or, more truly, added to everyday reality the fantastic emphasis and colour of a dream. Eleanor had the sensation of living in a dream that might at any moment turn into a nightmare. She was resolved, nevertheless, to enjoy the weather while she could, and to enjoy, moreover, a few hours of solitude, of freedom from Paul’s engaging but unrestful company. Paul had recently acquired a devoted friend in the person of Flora Wagstaff, the nine-year-old daughter of a neighbour. Flora was a child who knew what she wanted and allowed nothing to stand in the way of her getting it. At present she wanted the company of Paul, whom, therefore, she had “ called for” soon after lunch and escorted willy-nilly to Sunday School, “ whatever” (said Paul, in his most adult manner) “ that may be.” It would be his first experience of Sunday School.

  Adam’s approach was so tentative, so discreet, that Eleanor became aware first of his shadow, cast on the brilliant green ground. The young man had wearied of David’s book, David’s Sunday papers, and his own company.

  “Hullo, Eleanor! Do I disturb you?”

  “Not at all,” said Eleanor, confused but polite. “ You quite startled me, though. I think I was daydreaming.”

  “Sure you weren’t asleep?”

  “Oh no,” she said earnestly. “ Shall I fetch you a chair?” In retrospect the remark sounded “forward” : she was inclined to wish it unsaid.

  “Good gracious, no,” said Adam. “ Let me sit at your feet.” He dropped on to the grass and smiled up at her, perceiving that his attentions gave her a modest pleasure. With a flush in her cheeks she was almost pretty. You saw—if you had an eye—her possibilities. But, though his glance rested on her for a measurable moment, his thoughts did not stay so long : the latter end of his smile was tribute to another face than Eleanor’s.

  “Where’s young Paul?”

  “He’s gone off with his little friend Flora,” said Eleanor. “ To Sunday School, you know. Have you forgotten already?”

  “Completely,” said Adam, with the ready candour which people found so charming in him. “ I’ve had two thoughts and a dream since then. It’s aeons ago.”

  “So you’ve been asleep, have you?”

  Magically, Eleanor found herself at ease with this young man, whom she had met a score of times and never before talked with. She had, indeed, instinctively avoided conversational encounters with him, being convinced that anyone so witty and charming as he was must inevitably find her tedious.

  “No, mine were daydreams too,” said Adam, contriving to give to the confession a specious significance and an air of intimacy;

  We’ve something in common after all, thought Eleanor. We’re both dreamers. But he is more than that. He is intellectual and artistic and does things.

  “You don’t believe in Sunday Schools, Adam, do you?”

  “Believe in them?” Her ingenuousness was staggering. “ I shouldn’t know how to begin, my dear Eleanor. Apropos of which, by the way, David will be pretty sick if his son and heir gets religion.”

  He won’t do that,” said Eleanor. “ It’ll only be a few more fairy-tales added to his stock.”

  He looked at her in surprise. “ Did David say that, or is it your own?” Before she could either resent or answer the question he said quickly : “ Tell me about yourself, Eleanor.”

  “Myself?” The blush began again. She glanced away. Her left hand slipped from her lap and began plucking at the turf.

  “Yes,” he insisted. “ We’ve never had a proper talk, you and I.”

  “But there’s nothing to tell.”

  “Well, for a start,” said Adam, “ tell me about your friends. “ People you know in the neighbourhood, I mean.”

  “ I don’t know a great many. A few neighbours of course. I ... we don’t go out much. I think not going to church prevents one meeting people much. Churches are useful in that way, don’t you think? Of course I do go sometimes, but not often enough to join in the social part of it.”

  It flashed into Adam’s mind, as he watched her, that her way of speaking was attractive so long as you paid no attention to what she said. Perhaps attractive was putting it too strongly, but certainly there was more S.A. in her than he had supposed. It occurred to him too—the same thought had cropped up on other occasions—that with a word, a touch, he could put an end to this talk and create an entirely new and exciting situation. When a pretty girl insisted on talking too much, there was one infallible way of stopping her. Without unkindness, moreover. Far from it. Kiss the girl that’s nearest, though she’s dull at whiles. And so brighten her up.

  “What you said about David not liking it if Paul got interested in religion,” said Eleanor. “ I expect you were joking. David’s not bigoted, you know. I wouldn’t even call him an unbeliever.”

  “Wouldn’t you?” Adam began to find something touching in this simplicity.

  “No. Not exactly. I think his feeling is that things are better if they’re not put into words.”

  Adam nodded gravely. She was even more simple-minded than Lily Elver, he decided. That wasn’t necessarily against her : not by any means. But, though his curiosity was tickled, it was inconceivable that he should listen much longer to this nursery stuff.

  “And you?” he said gently. “ It was you I asked you to talk about.”

  “My friends, you said,” she answered, with a touch of demureness that made her suddenly seem a different girl. “ David’s a friend, isn’t he?”

  Certainly she had unexpectedness, this queer, quiet girl.

  “He doesn’t count : he’s family,” Adam retort
ed. “ When we were on the downs this morning we met some people riding.”

  “Someone we know?”

  “David knew them. An old man and a girl.”

  “Was it Dr. Hinksey, I wonder?”

  Adam said carefully : “ I believe that was the name. He wanted to know the earliest thing we could remember.”

  “Then it was Dr. Hinksey. He’s a lovely person. Very unconventional, of course. A great talker, and always interesting.”

  But not so lovely, not so interesting, as his granddaughter, thought Adam with exasperated irony. Why in the name of heaven can’t you talk about her, dear Eleanor?”

  “And the girl with him—who would she be?”

  “Mary Wilton, I expect. A dark, good-looking girl, was it?”

  “With a rather beautiful clear complexion,” said Adam, “ and an air of ... what?… breeding, I suppose you might call it.”

  “Yes,” said Eleanor simply. “ Men always feel like that about her.”

  “Does she live in her grandfather’s house?”

  “She’s been there for some months now. I’ve heard no talk of her leaving.”

  “Why should she leave?”

  “If you’ve seen Mary, as I gather you have,” said Eleanor, “ you must know that she won’t be content always to live a quiet country life. She doesn’t fit in.”

  “Really? I thought she went with the scenery rather well.” Adam noticed, and smiled at the thought, that at mention of Mary Wilton the milk-and-water Eleanor had seemed to change her character. On the whole he approved of the change. “ Besides,” he said, “ what about yourself? You seem to fit in all right, as you put it.”

  “I’m different. There’s just no comparison.” As if reproachful of what seemed like insincerity in him, she added quickly : “ That must be obvious even to you.”

  “Why, even to me? Am I so obtuse?”

  “Perhaps I ought to have said especially to you,” Eleanor said, with the gentlest smile. “ Why didn’t you go out to Radnage this afternoon? They’d have been delighted to see you.”