Sunflower

by Rebecca West

  It was after that he suggested they should go to the Embassy and telephoned for a table. She was glad, for they had a lovely time. She had never liked the Embassy before at night, but he saw to it that she enjoyed it. He did look after one well. When he told her in the car that Maurice and Leonora Hughes were dancing there just now, and she said she’d never seen them before as Essington didn’t care for that sort of thing, he was so pleased that he was going to show her something lovely for the first time, and he took ever such pains to make sure that she should see them properly. He wouldn’t take the table that had been reserved for them because she wouldn’t have had a good view, and they had to wait in the doorway till another was put in for them right in the corner of the dancing floor, which was embarrassing, for it meant that they had to stand under the white spotlight which was trained there ready for the dancers’ entrance. He felt shy too. She could feel him shaken by silent nervous laughter. Then when they sat down he was quite fussy about ordering something that she’d fancy, not a bit like Essington, who never picked up a menu without reminding her that she oughtn’t to eat anything or she’d get fat. He let her have sweet wine, too. And Leonora Hughes was the loveliest thing she’d ever seen. She was like the smell of one’s hands after one has been picking lemon verbena, and she looked so really nice, as if her life was like her feathery, floating dress, as if when she was disappointed about anything she wouldn’t work it off by being nasty to anybody else, but would just go away and cry and then suddenly stop crying and be very happy because of nothing in particular, as if her emotions were shapely and slim like her legs. During her funny dance, when she and Maurice pretended to be a stenographer and a travelling salesman at a New York palais de danse, and everybody was shrieking with laughter, it broke on Sunflower that at last she was having as good a time as the people at the next table. She was enjoying herself in the way she ought to have enjoyed herself during her twenties and hadn’t. Because of Francis Pitt she was not, after all, going to miss anything, though she was thirty. Enjoying her own laughter as much as any part of the treat, she turned her laughing face towards him, so that he might see what he had done for her; and was appalled by his appearance. He was sitting hunched up in his chair, his great head pressing down his short neck to nothingness between his shoulders, looking troglodytish, queer in shape and queer in substance, for his blank and joyless face had turned the grey-brown colour that a chip in coarse china shows. His narrowed eyes stared across the lit space where Leonora twirled like the crescent moon trying to be buffoonish, over the smiling faces of the people who sat up to their necks in indistinctness at the tables, to the middle of the purple and green wall, which was now supported at regular intervals as by caryatids by the men and women who were standing up on the plush benches so that they could see better, almost dissolved by darkness to mere stripes of decoration, alternately magpie and gaily coloured, save when laughter made them sway forward and bring their shadow-patterned faces near the light. There the door was an oblong of darkness. He wanted to be outside it. She saw his spirit wandering down some unlit street that led to no home. She gave a little moan of distress and sympathy and put out her hand as if to stroke her wrist. He turned and looked very gravely at her, seemed to make some resolution, and made a slow reluctant gesture towards the orchestra, as if when the music stopped he would tell her something important and not pleasant. Again she had that sense of being strong enough for both. It did not matter what he had to tell her, she could bear up under it, she could make something of it.

  But when the music stopped he told her nothing. It happened that one of the men who were sitting at the table behind them stood up and in the wildness of his applause pressed quite close against Sunflower, so that his coat touched her bare shoulders. Both she and Francis Pitt looked up at him sharply, and they saw it was the Duke of Victoria, a big fair man, whose downy face now as always bore an aggrieved expression, as if he were slightly hurt that he had not been born a bull. Francis put his arm round her with a protective movement so intimate that it surprised her, so vehement that it jogged the Duke’s attention away from Leonora. He stared hard at Sunflower whom he had been trying to get to know for years, quite unsuccessfully, for he wasn’t the sort of person it did one any good to be seen with, since he’d kept everybody that you can keep and married several of the rest. Then he looked at Francis and said in an astonished, congratulatory tone, ‘Oh, it’s you, Pitt!’ It was funny what a child Francis was in some ways. He couldn’t have given himself away more if he had tried than he did by his sleepy, happy, preoccupied smile, his vague, friendly, remote, definitely dismissive greeting, which begged that he might be left in peace with his delight. But of course it didn’t matter. She turned to him as soon as all the clapping was over, and asked, ‘What is it?’ He faced her with an expression that was so satisfied with the moment that in anybody else it would have been gross. ‘What is what?’ She stammered, ‘When you looked at the door I thought …’ He said patiently, as if she had been tactless to remind him of his lapse into depression but would be forgiven because he liked her so much, ‘I was thinking of Hurrell. Let’s dance now. It’s “Horsey, keep your tail up”.’ For a little she was uncomfortable because she had been so stupid, but then she looked furtively at his face to see if she had really upset him, and found it heavy with a secret joy, the eyes veiled, the lips slightly parted, and again suspected that he loved her. Certainly he must love her. Why, when they got up to go during a lull in the music and went across the dancing-floor towards the door he walked beside her with so contented an air of possessiveness that they might already have been lovers.

  That was the last time she had ever seen him at night. He had asked her to go out to supper again, but Essington had made a fuss and said she would lose her looks if she kept late hours. She had hopes that perhaps they might dine together on Sundays, but Essington had just about then developed a queer passion for going away with her every weekend. It was true that she still saw him in the daytime but that did not make up for the lack of seeing him at night. There was a funny way his shirt-front bulged, like the cheeks of a cherub, that she wanted to see as if she were starving and the sight of it food she could eat. But of course she ought to be thankful because now she lunched with him nearly every day except when she had a matinée. And that was lovely, for one met so many interesting people. Always, always, there was somebody else there. To begin with, there was Etta, who was a dear but got on her nerves because she would look at her as if she were sorry for her. Once Sunflower and Francis had been in the library together, bending over the central table and turning over the pages of a huge old Bible, the illustrations of which amused him for some reason that she couldn’t understand though of course she laughed, when she got a feeling that she was being watched. She raised her head sharply and looked out of one of the windows and saw Etta standing on the terrace outside in a petrified attitude. Her eyes were fixed on Sunflower and her brother, her right hand held a pair of scissors open above a rose on one of the standards, her left hand was crushing a sheaf of bright flowers against her flat and heavy bosom so tightly that it was apparent that she was so absorbed in what she was seeing that she did not know what she was doing; and her swarthy face was darkened a second time by a cloud of heavy, foreboding compassion. Sunflower flashed a smile at her to show her that it was all right, and Etta gave such a start at having been seen, and so forced an answering smile that it was apparent she obstinately believed it to be all wrong. After lunch, when Francis went up to see Hurrell, she had done her best to make it plain to Etta (as she had already tried to do more than once but the woman didn’t seem capable of taking it in) that Essington had been ever so much better lately and that anyway she was gorgeously, marvellously, indestructibly happy just now. This Etta had handsomely but uneasily pretended to accept, saying, ‘Yes, they do have their ups and downs, don’t they? And the ups are just as up as the downs are down,’ but she had worn such an expression of infinite pity that Sunflower could have sma
cked her face.

  But after all Etta did not matter, for she had a right to be there. If Francis Pitt had not wanted her there, he still could hardly have helped having her there. It was her home. But all those other people had no right in the house, they could be there only because Francis Pitt wanted them to be there. Now as the car swung down the chestnut avenue she stared ahead of her at the open gates that were hinged on a blank of green brightness at the end of the shadows and bared her teeth at the thought of the enemies that were behind them. There were so many of them. While Harrowby drove the car up the drive, which he was doing with such ill temper that several times they lurched on to the grass kerb, she looked from right to left as she might have for an ambush. Of course she could see well enough why he liked some of them to be there. It was indeed a proof of his unique virtue, of the shaggy beauty of his character, that he should have them there. He had Bryce Atkin and Mr Macbride the banker there rather more than their connection with his political party made necessary, but that was because of his great sense of humour. It was so funny to see the pair of them facing the politician’s problem in such different ways: Mr Bryce Atkin conscious, with a roll and momentary dulling of his bright little robin’s eye, that he was going to too many places for his soul’s sake, and then brisking up and shaking out his feathers and deciding to work off any moral blame that might have attached itself to him by giving as good a show as he knew how at every place he went to so that nobody could say he was accepting hospitality for nothing; Mr Macbride conscious, with an increasing concavity of his Scotch jaws, of the same disquieting fact and, after assuming a silent lankness just too clenched to be called limpness, making a sustained effort to repudiate the whole situation by giving no sort of show at all. Their presence there was really quite lovely, because it was proof not only of Francis Pitt’s sense of humour but also of his beautiful modesty. He invited them just as he invited the colonial administrators and foreign potentates who sometimes gave his dining-room a Pathé Gazette look, because it was a constant amazement to him that such important people should bother to visit the ugly, undersized son of a Wesleyan minister. He thought nothing of himself, the poor little thing. It was that which accounted too for his passion for having nice-looking, wild people about him. He used to hang round his own tennis-court when Teddy Drayton and Lord Orisser were playing a singles as if he thought that it was good of them to let him look on, and watch them with the most pathetically worshipping, unjealous envy. It was the same desire to know at secondhand what it was to be physically active as he was not that made him fill the place with young people like Peggy Bryce Atkin, and the three Cornelliss children, Lionel, Michael, and Susan, who looked so nice playing tennis in their white things with their long legs and their lovely straight backs and their sleek brushed heads, and who sounded such ducks when they called to each other in the high voice that girls and boys who have been well brought up have, a thin, pure voice which wouldn’t be any use on the stage and is lovely in private life. It was nice of Francis Pitt to have them about; it wasn’t every man who liked children. And it was nice of him to have their father, Sir Robert Cornelliss, because it must be just out of gratitude for the way he was looking after Mr Hurrell, for he was the most awful old bore. He was one of those people who embarrass you terribly because they sit around not saying very much but making you feel that they are telling themselves some silly kind of a story about you. He would come and stand behind her while she was watching the tennis, very tall and greyhoundish, resting his fine, long hands on the back of the bench miles away from her shoulders, so that it couldn’t be that which made her feel so uncomfortable; turning his distinguished, high-bridged profile swiftly and suavely from player to player; occasionally making a remark about the score in his pleasant voice and keeping an easy, unfidgetting silence in between the games. He did not do or say a thing that was objectionable, yet when he said a courteous farewell and strolled away she had a horrid sense that he had pinched something from her, that he had put her at a disadvantage. But there wasn’t any denying that he did everything he could think of for Mr Hurrell, and didn’t mind coming over any time he was sent for, day or night. Of course Francis Pitt had to give him the run of the house.

  But there could be no reason at all why he should have to ask those beastly people, Billie Murphy and Lord Canterton! It made one sick to watch Billie Murphy running about the tennis-court with the movements of a stocky little pony, wearing an expression of bluffness and healthy commonsense, calling out shrewd technicalities about the new court to Francis in a quiet, jolly, schoolboy voice, being no end of a good fellow till something happened, her foot slipped or the sun overpassed the great cedar and dazzled her. Then there would show, printed greyly on the stubborn golden moon of her face, a second face, the peaked, vacillating, lonely face of the drunkard, who does not think lovingly of anything in the world but the next drink, who does not feel anything for the surrounding scene but headachy peevishness. It made one sick to watch Lord Canterton go out on the court, carrying his racket in one large oblong red hand and tossing up three balls in the air with the other, in a manner that would have been just excusable if he had been the only man since the beginning of time who had been able to perform that feat; wearing the pompous and meaningless expression that is affected by the statelier and less efficient sort of manicurist when she carries her dish of soap and water across the room, the eyebrows raised, the chin dropped but the mouth closed, the whole advertising a state of bored superiority over somebody who was not here in an issue which was purely imaginary; carrying himself with such slow swaggering vulgarity of movement that his white flannel trousers looked as loud as loud checks and his sleek black hair seemed a facetious and ungentlemanly way of treating the head like a billycock worn on one side. One could not blame poor little Billie, for she was so young that someone must have worked hard to make her what she was. But certainly both of them, whoever was to blame for it, were coarse and greedy and futile people. There was not an ugly thing in the world they would not do. There was not one fine end that they served. They could not fulfil any real need in Francis Pitt. There could not even, considering that Francis Pitt was a Liberal and that both Canterton and Sir John Murphy belonged to what Essington called the hiccuping wing of the Conservative Party, be any worldly reason why he should ask them to his house. He must have them there simply because he preferred having them there to being alone with her. Once she had forced herself to admit that, she tore up the argument she had been weaving for days and, staring at its loose threads, admitted further that it was utterly amazing that any at all of his guests should be in his house just now. It was against nature. Bryce Atkin and Mr Macbride and the princes and ministers might satisfy his ambition and his sense of fun and his humility, Teddy Drayton and Lord Orisser and the schoolboys and schoolgirls his touching wish that he had been born better-looking than he was, Cornelliss his desire to be loyal to his friends and kind to those who were good to his friends, but those were not real needs compared to their desperate common needs to be alone together. Nothing could happen, of course, because she was still with Essington, but they ought to be alone together just once.

  She was pale now, not only because she was going to meet Francis Pitt in a few seconds, but also because of the way of their meeting. Yet, though that was agonising, she felt not depressed but exalted by it. There was a quality of importance about Francis which was not of her imagining. She had verified its existence by watching Bryce Atkin and Mr Macbride when they were watching him, and noting how there came quite often into the amused brightness of Bryce Atkin’s eye a hard, computing, and ultimately respectful sparkle, and into the unamused dullness of Mr Macbride’s eye a grudging gleam. Both of them were almost contemptuously entertained by Francis Pitt’s charlatan ways, but they both felt it not impossible that some day he might produce from his coat-sleeve neither a rabbit nor a guinea pig but a sceptre, which he would nurse for a while in his short, folded arms and chuckle over with narrowed eyes and
then suddenly lift in a gesture of rulership which the world would not disobey. This quality of importance gave the strange circumstances of their close and remote companionship, their intimate separateness, the dignity of a historical mystery. She felt as if she were some girl with a high white coif on her head riding on a led palfrey through the forest into a clearing wholly ringed by armed men leaning on their spears, where she would find him between two tall guards, his hands tied behind him, his hair wilder and worn longer, his face more kingly and more wolfish, while the one who had for the time being gained the upper hand of him sat on a stool amongst his counsellors and watched their meeting. Well, if that were the only way that one could go to him, it was the best thing in the world. And it was glorious to know that if the armed men and the enemies were not there and there was only the short grass, and the wild rose briars, and the dark sweet-smelling arcades of the forest, he would fall so gladly at her feet and bury his face against her body, kissing the stuff of her gown with his great mouth. But what could not be borne was that the armed men were there because he wished them there, that he himself had tied his hands behind him, that he himself was the enemy who mocked their love by making them meet publicly. What could it mean? Why was he torturing both of them like this? Was it just that he knew she wanted to stay with Essington—which she did, of course she did—and he was helping her? Or was it that there was another woman? There did not seem to be. Surely he had not time. She knew fairly well what he did with his days and he seemed to be always in the open, either up here in the house and gardens, or at political parties and dinners. Yet she could not be quite sure. She knew from something Etta had said that he had been out on Thursday night, but she did not know where. Of course there were lots of interstices in his time, hours here and there when he might have been with someone he loved. But he was in love with her, why should he go to any other woman? That was a silly question. He might have tied himself up to somebody in a way that could not be broken. Perhaps he had made love to a married woman who had wanted to be good and had gone against her conscience because she loved him so, and now of course he could not leave her. At that some force much fiercer than herself leaped up inside her body and ran like mercury through her flesh, arguing that though this was the sort of scruple she had respected all her life it must go down before the work that she and it had in hand. Instantly she deserted to its side; and had once more that feeling which she had had so often since she knew Francis Pitt of being called to some tremendous battle and having an inexhaustible store of power with which to fight it. She straightened herself, feeling in her shoulders, her back, her loins, the strength of a great tower.