Sunflower

by Rebecca West

  But a thought weakened her. Maybe the case was simpler than this. Maybe he did not love her and she had only thought he did because she wished he did. It was something one could not disregard, that he never wanted to see her alone. Maybe he loved some girl for her beauty. The force that was running through her flesh ran with less spirit now. There were some lovely girls about nowadays, and far more of them than there used to be. And they wanted so little. They did not care if the man loved them. She would be dark, probably, this girl; men did not seem to care for fair women the way they used to. And without any figure. And young. As young, most likely, as she herself had been when she first went with Essington. If Francis Pitt would tell her she would not mind so much. She might be able to help the girl, tell her the best places to get clothes. Girls often made mistakes when they began to dress.

  Feeling a little sick because of this thought, she got out of the car and found Francis Pitt and one of the sleek-headed young secretaries from the City office standing at the foot of the steps. Rehearsing serenity, she smiled first at the young man; but found his face scarlet, his eyes bright and blind with anger.

  She turned to Francis Pitt, and saw that he was hideous with rage.

  In a voice that climbed shakily down from shrillness to his usual register he greeted her, ‘Ah, Sunflower, that’s a lovely frock you’ve got on. Beautiful, beautiful!’ and gripped her hand. Still holding it, in a curiously familiar, fondling gesture, he wheeled round on the secretary and said in a tone of dismissal, ‘Well, goodbye, Harrop, and don’t ask every girl you meet to marry you.’

  The young man mumbled something. From his trembling, jerking hands slipped a notebook. A fan of loose leaves scattered on the gravel. Francis Pitt stooped and recovered them with one swift movement that was an insulting comment on the other’s clumsiness. He held them out to him without looking at him, smiled into her eyes, and said slowly and deeply and happily, ‘We are going to be alone together today, Sunflower.’

  She said timidly as they went into the hall, ‘Whatever has upset you so?’

  Gravely he shook his head. She need not have been afraid. The lines on his face were those of grieved fatherhood. Of course he was not doing what Essington did, and making himself feel better by making other people feel worse. ‘That young fool has made the mistake of his life. I’ll tell you later. Just now I feel too badly about it.’ He checked himself on the threshold of the library with a curious hunching movement of his shoulders, like a butting beast that sees barbed wire in front of it, and growled over his shoulder to the footman, ‘There are not enough flowers today!’ She hated that footman. A great strong young fellow like that ought to get something better to do than carry round two cocktails on a tray. Every time she saw him she felt as she had done that first time she came to the house and found him sniggering over Canterton, which hardened into an angry recognition that he and she were of the same class and that in some way he had failed her. Now she could have smacked his face, as he moved his full lips in silent acknowledgement of his master’s complaint and looked past him into the library with a gaze which was certainly insolent, since it dwelt gogglingly on the froth of flowers that dripped from the vases set nearly rim to rim along the bookshelves and on the tables, but which meanly protected itself from rebuke by its blankness. Well, if he felt like that he shouldn’t be his servant. There was plenty of other work in the world for a big hulk of a man.

  When he left the room she drew off her gloves, looking round her. Certainly they seemed to be alone. There was no other guest. She turned to Francis Pitt and found that he had taken up one of the cocktail glasses and was holding it out to her. His eyes were running over her with less disguise of their interest in her beauty than usual; and there was a certain grossness in that interest, which he was making no effort to hide, but was rather parading, that was not what one liked. But if it was part of his troubled state, one took it from him, of course.

  ‘Drink, Sunflower!’ he said.

  She told him gently, ‘I don’t, you know,’ but took the glass because his trembling fingers had so nearly dropped it. He gave a heavy, disgusted look at his hand and did not turn back to the tray. She perceived that he wanted a drink very badly, but would not take the other cocktail in case he could not manage to hold it. So she lifted her glass towards his mouth. But he drew back his head as an animal does, when it is offered food by a stranger. He was ashamed that a woman had observed his weakness and was helping him. To get round that she smiled in a silly sort of way, as if she were doing it out of flirtatious-ness. Then his brows looked lighter, he flung back his head and laughed into her eyes, lowered his lips to the glass, looking wisely and lewdly over the brim at her. She smiled back, saying serenely to herself, ‘This is not where I want to be with him, but I can withdraw from this minute when I have given him his drink, I have the strength to climb out of it.’ It struck her that this was the sort of thing that people who were lovers did quite a lot, particularly at the beginning of their time together. She regarded it with a sense of achievement, yet coldly, almost contemptuously, as an ambitious boy who meant to be a millionaire might think of the first weekly wage he earned as an office boy. She felt a pang of compunction at her own inexorable intentions towards him.

  He raised his head and looked at her with his huge lips pursed with the act of drinking, with the thought of an enjoyment. ‘Ah, that’s the way to take a drink,’ he said jocularly, and with a steadier hand took the glass back from her.

  There was a pause while he set it down. The fact that they were alone, that for the first time they were alone, seemed to make a loud humming noise in the silence. He did not do anything to help her, even when he turned round. He did not say anything, and she could not make out what he was feeling, for his face and body were twitching with movements that were nothing except records of excitement.

  Of course it might be an accident that they were alone. He might not have wished for it at all. She bit her knuckles at that thought and asked, ‘Did—did Etta have to go out?’

  He must have happened to think of something funny at that moment, for he had to suppress a gust of laughter before he answered gravely, ‘I sent poor Etta out. I thought it would do her no harm to have a day’s shopping and lunch with a friend. It is hard on her having to go through this Hurrell business with me. And anyway I wanted …’ his voice died away with an air of embarrassment. He took the other cocktail, looking down as he drank. Again there fell a silence.

  Just for the sake of doing something to break the strain, she pointed through the window at the sunlit gardens and murmured, in a voice that shook like her pulse, ‘It’s summer now, the spring’s gone, another spring’s gone …’

  He was just in the middle of turning up his glass for the last drop with a gesture that in its mechanical avidity made her think uneasily of how she had seen Sir John Murphy do the same thing in too nearly the same way, but he brought it down abruptly and stood staring at her, his mouth a little open. She realised that she had uttered those words which were of no importance, which she had chosen at random, with an absurd tragical emphasis. But she could not dispel the impression with laughter, for whatever he thought her words had meant had reminded him of something sad and something important to him, and he was saying with a shame-faced earnestness which she could not possibly interrupt, ‘Sunflower … Sunflower …’

  It was a pity that the footman should have come back to announce lunch just at that moment; and that Francis Pitt should have started up so violently at his entrance, and burst into nervous laughter, and moved away from her. It looked as if they had been kissing or doing something silly, and she could see from the footman’s face, from an infinitesimal thickening of those coarse lips, from a shifting of his eye under the drooped lids, that that was exactly what he thought. She couldn’t but admit that this was Francis Pitt’s fault. He hadn’t been thinking of touching her when the door was opened, he’d been feeling far too upset about whatever it was that her words suggested to him, an
d he wouldn’t have anyway, since she was with Essington; but his mind had had some comic postcard stuff about kissing in it, and that had showed. If one stayed ever so quiet in a scene where one ought to be listening intently, but instead got thinking of whether Essington would still be cross when one went home, they felt it out in front at once. It occurred to her, and the suspicion strengthened as she crossed the hall and felt him snort with a silent chuckle and brush against her as they got into the dark part outside the dining-room, that quite possibly he might be cheap and common when he made love. She had always known that he was not a gentleman as Essington was, that he had not been so nicely brought up. It did not matter at most times because he was nice inside and never had anything to express but kindliness and protectiveness and strength; but she could imagine that when he was feeling jolly and wanted to have a good time with somebody he liked he might get vulgar and enjoy meaningless noises and scufflings like those she used to hear when she was little and there were family festivities and cousins went to help each other wash up in the scullery. Even then she had not liked such things, they seemed an injury to beauty like footmarks on a sheet of snow; and in the life she had lived since they would have been counted as certain evils had they ever been thought of, for they were akin to bad acting and would have been more disgusting than any sin to Essington, who so greatly hated all sounds and movements that were not fine-pointed with purpose. She knew that in this matter she and Essington and her world were right, and that Francis Pitt was wrong. But if it were the way that Francis Pitt felt, then she would put up with it. Again she had that feeling of being a great draught-horse that could drag any load.

  As they entered the dining-room the footman, plainly embarrassed by having to ask a question he ought to have asked in the other room, said, ‘You’ll not be waiting for Mr Harrop, then, sir?’

  There was a third place laid at the table. Sunflower and Francis Pitt both stared at the diagram of knives and forks on the white cloth in silence. Francis Pitt pulled himself together. ‘No, no. Mr Harrop’s not lunching with us! I never meant him to! Take those things away!’

  It was all right. He had wanted to be alone with her.

  But she did hate that footman. He made such a clatter taking away the silver, and looked so rudely at Francis Pitt while he did it, as if he wanted to answer back. But it was lovely when he had left the room. She had been thinking of something disagreeable just before he came in, but now she could not have imagined what it could have been, although she was so shaken by the beating of her heart that she felt dizzy. Life suddenly seemed to have changed its gear and to have become calmer than she had ever known it. The heavy curtains were looped back from the window and she could look straight up into a dark blue sky, which because it was crossed by bright white clouds like galleons in full sail seemed not like a dome of warm summer air but like an inverted salt and invigorating sea. The spinach and eggs she was eating, and the iced lemonade she was drinking, had a clean taste, and the flowers in the room were all of cottage garden kinds, with dark sprigs of sweet-smelling herbs among them. And Francis Pitt did not look silly any more, but sat at the head of his table as one would like to see a man sit at the head of one’s table, dignified and leisurely and sensible. There was not a thing she would have wished different.

  ‘Well,’ he asked after a while, ‘how’s the play going?’

  Absurdly she found that she was shy. Her voice came in the funniest little husky growl. ‘All right.’

  A minute later he tried again.

  ‘Has the man who’s been rehearsing Cosmo Davis’s part played it yet?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he give a good show?’

  ‘Mm. Rather.’

  It was dreadful. She must sound quite rude. She wanted to cry.

  He ate a few more mouthfuls, set down his fork, put his elbows on the table, and cupped his face in his hands. Looking into her eyes, he said deliberately, ‘Dear Sunflower, who hasn’t a word to say for herself for ever so long after she comes into a room. Just sits mum. But who all the time is the best company in the world.’

  She set down her fork too. He continued to sit quite still and look at her. She could feel that the intimacy of his words and their undisguised affection were as much of a delight to him as they were to her, as much of an indulgence after long famine. Her hands fluttered up to cover her mouth. Through her laced fingers she smiled at him plaintively, begging for mercy. He must not make her too happy.

  He went on, ‘Do you know that, Sunflower? There isn’t a soup ever made that has heard a single word from your lips. It all goes down to its grave behind the waistcoat buttons without ever getting a whisper of that lovely voice of yours. There isn’t a fish that ever heard it either. The roast beef or chicken may get a little bit of it. May get a “Mm” or the beginning of a sentence that gets chopped in two on a pink lower lip by two remarkably handsome white teeth. But nothing but the ice-pudding has any real luck. I could sing when I see that stuff coming in, though I haven’t touched it for years. I say to myself, “Now we’ll hear what Sunflower has to say”. And then she does let us know what sort of pretty things she’s been thinking and feeling about this old world of ours, and it makes us all very happy. And that’s how it goes every time.’

  She smiled and moved her lips, but no sound would come.

  ‘Tell me, Sunflower, why are you so shy with us? Are you bored with us?’

  ‘Oh, no. Oh, no,’ she murmured.

  ‘Are you sure? Are you quite sure that you don’t find the talk tedious between us old men who care for dry things like politics? Are we asking too much of a kindness when we ask you to come here?’

  ‘Oh, no!’ she cried, finding her voice, ‘I’d rather be here than anywhere else in the whole world. I don’t know what I’d do if you stopped asking me!’

  He blinked. She saw that he was enormously pleased; but he continued to speak very gravely. ‘I am glad of that. I am very glad of that. Sometimes I’ve been worried by your silence. But I suppose it only means that you and I, Sunflower, are the kind of friends who do not have to talk to be of use to each other.’

  He took up his fork and went on with his eggs. She could not. She did not seem to want any food. To make things quite clear between them, so that he should never be troubled again by any suspicion that she did not like being with him, she explained timidly, ‘Really, I don’t talk because I haven’t anything to say.’

  ‘Nonsense. You have a great deal to say.’

  ‘Really I haven’t. I’m ever so stupid.’

  ‘You are not.’

  ‘Yes, I am. You don’t know how stupid I am. A head like a sieve. I can’t remember a thing.’

  ‘Yes, you can. You remember your parts. And you remember them well. That’s a very long part you’re playing now. And never once in all the times I’ve seen you in it have I heard the prompter helping you.’

  ‘What? What? Have you seen it more than once?’

  He was embarrassed. ‘Yes … two or three times …’

  To shield his embarrassment and her glowing pleasure she stumbled on quickly, ‘That’s different. I can’t remember other things. History. Dates. I don’t know when kings were. I tell you I’m stupid.’

  ‘I tell you you are not. You show intelligence in lots of ways. You run your house well. You are shrewd about practical things. You never spent foolishly in your life. You have good taste in art. You notice fine points about people. You are not a stupid woman.’

  Perturbed, because this was such a reversal of what she had heard from Essington, she murmured, ‘But I am stupid, really I am …’

  ‘I tell you you are not. If you have not mastered the world of intellectual things that Essington and I live in it is because you haven’t taken the trouble. You are reserving your energies for something else. That is how you always strike me. As being full of strength you will not spend on anything that you are doing now, because you are saving it for other things.’

  She looked at h
im with interest. She had felt that about herself quite often. Sometimes her body tingled from head to foot with undischarged force. Then she would want to get up and run round and round the room, and at the same time would want to go and lie down on her bed and cry and cry because there must be some more sensible thing to do when one was like that but she did not know what it was.

  ‘What are you saving your strength for, Sunflower?’