A Note in Music

by Rosamond Lehmann

  “I should think not,” agreed Clare.

  “I used to live in the South. I think if you’re born and bred a southerner you never quite get used to the climate—or anything—here. You may get to love it, but it’s almost like living abroad, I think. … You want to go home.”

  They nodded, looking at her with serious faces.

  She thought: “Why don’t I stop talking and let them go?”

  “I’d never want to settle here,” said Hugh.

  Clare gave him a glance which seemed to say: “As if you’d want to settle anywhere!”

  “It’s all right with the sun,” went on Grace. “I’ve been thinking, if all the people could get drenched through with sunlight once, the expression of their faces would be different ever after. But there’s never enough. The winter’s been very long, hasn’t it?” She looked up at Hugh.

  “I suppose it has,” he said.

  “If only this will last now. … The country must look beautiful.” She addressed Clare: “D’you live in the South?”

  “Yes.”

  “How lovely. I suppose it’s been spring there for a month now—real spring. Here it gets mixed up with summer all in a week or two, and after that it’s autumn again.”

  They laughed.

  “Well—we must get along,” said Hugh.

  The dog was running hysterically up and down the edge of the pond, hovering with wails on the verge of another plunge.

  “The old idiot,” he said; “I must go and collar him.” They watched him striding away.

  “Are you staying with Norah?” Grace said.

  “Yes. … Do you know Norah?” She sounded surprised.

  “Oh, yes. Norah and I—started here about the same time. We went to a cookery school together.” She laughed and added: “She told me you were coming some time. I haven’t seen her lately. I don’t want to see any one when I’m ill.” She smiled.

  “She’s such a dear,” said Clare with composure. She took a little gold box from her bag and carefully powdered her nose.

  “I suppose he doesn’t mind her doing that,” thought Grace anxiously, as Hugh came back with his dog. Powdering in public derived from indecency in the male code to which she was accustomed. Years ago, on expeditions with Tom, Poudre Nildé had burnt a hole in her pocket. She had given up carrying it now.

  “He’s a nice dog,” she said. “He’s got charming paws.” She held out a hand, and the paws were planted effusively in her lap. “You clever, you noble swimmer,” she said. She kissed the top of the black satin head. Something warmer broke through the pleasant politeness of Hugh’s smile.

  “Have you got a dog?” he said.

  “No.” She paused, and added, colouring: “I’ve seen him before. … I’ve seen you sometimes in the evening going down the road to the Park with him. … You pass my window.”

  “Oh, have you seen us?” he said, rather awkwardly. It embarrassed him to realize he had not given her a second’s thought, going down the avenue. He had quite forgotten where she lived. “Yes, I give him a run when I get back from the office. And before breakfast too: we run round the Park. Very good for us both. Luckily my new landlady’s lost her heart to him. But it’s a rotten life for the poor chap.” He broke into a broad smile. “At first I tried smuggling him into the office. I thought he might sleep under my desk. But it didn’t work. He let out a yelp in the first half-hour: the clerk next to me stepped on his toe. There was the hell of a row.” He relapsed into sudden shyness—remembering Tom perhaps, she thought. Tom would certainly not have been amused. “Well, good-bye,” he said quickly.

  “I do hope you’ll soon be quite well,” said Clare.

  “Thank you. … Good-bye.” She blushed; her eyes shifted nervously away from them and then back to them as they turned to leave her.

  Hugh looked back suddenly and said:

  “This weather’ll soon put you right, I expect”; and his voice was so encouraging, his enthusiasm for the weather so whole-hearted, his appearance, with the sun on his bare, ruffled head so engaging, that she almost laughed aloud, and called “Yes; oh, yes!” and put up her hand in a swift gauche little gesture of farewell.

  They walked away down the asphalt path, and she watched them go—charged already with that excess of mystery, that weight of meaning which they were to bear for her henceforth, for ever after.

  Tom would be back soon from his golf club committee meeting, waiting for supper. She must go home. She got up, feeling new life in her limbs. The ache was gone from her back and the sickly, dusty feeling from her mind. They had refreshed her, she told herself. … What had they said?

  But it was she who had talked nearly all the time, not they. … Nervousness had made her chatter. … No, it was not that: to her own surprise she had not felt shy or self-conscious after the first few moments. It was the way they had looked, as if they had come bearing gifts … she mused over the expression. … Yes, that was it: bearing gifts. They had fed a spring inside her, the words had bubbled up from a source long dry. She had been filled with a sense of momentary adequacy as a person; had been enabled to give utterance to little things which were her own. And again she had felt herself thinking peacefully: “This is what life is. … What I am like.”

  They had such good manners, both of them: easy, delightful manners from the South. … She warmed herself again at the thought that he had taken the trouble to stop and speak to her.

  What did they talk about together, the brother and sister?

  She would be gone out of their minds for ever by now.

  It had all been a dream.

  She walked along, past the bandstand, between the railed plots of lawn with their careful beds and groups of evergreen shrubbery. More than the trams, more than the gasworks, and the shops and the smoking chimney-stacks, was this garden wont to speak to her of the town, the town. But to-day, in the borders tall tulips were unsheathing the faint-tinged petals of their sculptured heads; and there, above a bed of variegated laurel and privet, was a little almond tree in full flower, shaking out its rosy branches with simple prettiness on the blue air. After all, she thought, one blossoming branch can make a spring. Here was the essence of the season. The country ways could only play variations on this theme.

  There was a small boy kneeling on the path in front of her, examining a red wooden engine: a nondescript child in a white sweater and blue serge knickers. He looked up a moment, then down again at his toy, and said in a preoccupied voice:

  “I’ve lost something off this engine.”

  “What have you lost?”

  “A bit of wood.”

  She said:

  “What a beauty! It’s so enormous.”

  He said:

  “It goes as fast as anything. Look.”

  He seized the string and rushed with it a few yards, looking back at it over his shoulder with some anxiety.

  “Very fast indeed,” she said. “I should like a ride.”

  He threw her an appraising glance, and said carelessly:

  “You’re too big.” He made another examination, sighed deeply and added: “Besides, the back wheels are wobbling. I must find that bit that’s lost.”

  He picked up the engine in both arms and started to walk away; then stopped to say:

  “If you come to-morrow I’ll show you my motor.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll look out for you. Good-bye.”

  “’Bye.”

  This time he stood and eyed her gravely as she went away.

  No doubt, she thought, children could be amusing. She had never had such an encounter before; and certainly, on the assumption that mutual boredom and embarrassment could be the sole reactions, never attempted to seek one. But he had accepted her after one glance as equal and fellow, and they had shared a few moments quite complete, to her, in the essentials of comp
anionship.

  Now she had turned into the avenue. It was quiet almost as a country lane. One or two couples strolled ahead of her; there was not a tram in sight; red brick, yellow brick melted and glowed tenderly in sloping shafts of sunlight.

  “It’s all right,” she whispered to herself; and she went in through her front door and left it wide open to the air.

  Tom was not in yet. Annie’s voice came from the kitchen; subdued and yet insistent it sounded, with its north-country­ lilt; and a man’s voice answered her briefly now and again. “It was my friend, madam,” Annie would modestly reply, if questioned. His voice had suddenly begun to haunt the house a year or so ago. Since then the aural manifestations had been regular; but Annie had not revealed him to the eye. Perhaps she would marry him some day. What would they do without her?

  She went into the sitting-room and stood at the window. Several times, standing there, she had seen him pass. She was ashamed to realize to what extent the hope of seeing him had become interwoven with her old habit of looking out of the window. He had come swinging along with his special stride, idle and powerful, a noble stride, and it had given her pleasure to watch him: pleasure and a kind of ironic pang to be so certain he would never glance in her direction, remembering her.

  It was foolish to have told him: it had stressed something—some tremendous contrast—in public, which should have remained her secret. … Besides, he would not like to feel himself watched.

  Now that the sun had left the street, the colour of the air was hyacinth-blue; and oh! … she saw suddenly the lilac tree was in full leaf, and there, at the top, were two or three clusters of whitish buds. It was years since it had flowered.

  In her neighbours’ gardens grew, on one side a may tree, on the other a laburnum. Lilac, laburnum, may, none of them had ever had any reality. They were nothing; they did not grow from roots in the earth; they were emblems of the town, dismal imitations, like the feather and shell flowers everybody had nowadays. But now all at once she saw with emotion a small white lilac tree, struggling to grow after the manner of its kind—a starveling with crooked trunk and brittle haggard maze of leafless twigs, and a crown of grubby leaves: and see, it had laboured to put forth a few new shoots, tender and bright; it was going to have a flowering. It was awake, alive: it revealed itself to her, and she loved it. She dreamed, as she stood there, that it grew, covering the house, blotting out the street, climbed till it rose above the roof. She saw it in sunlight, cool and vast, a bountiful tower. The heart-shaped leaves swelled full, in cloudy masses, the profuse cones of blossom hung heavy and lambent in the green; and with a somnolent tremendous humming the bees came to the fragrance.

  She thought of a line in the little anthology Norah had given her last Xmas:

  “Come down to me, O my lilac among women.”

  What evocative beauty; what words for a lover! She knew all that the poet meant.

  She fell into another dream, of the vicarage in the Sussex village where she had lived till her seventeenth year. The walled garden bore a great old tulip tree; and by the gate a judas tree, that flared out each May in violent-coloured, unfamiliar blossom, seemed to cry danger and alien passion to the passer-by. She remembered interrupting a lesson in her first school-days to inform the teacher “We’ve got a tulip tree and a judas tree in our garden.” (It had seemed, still seemed, too much richness.) But later a schoolmate had remarked “I shouldn’t have thought a clergyman’s daughter would boast about a judas tree”: and she could still hear the corroboratory murmurs of the whole class, still feel her overpowering shame.

  What a garden that had been—how cherished by her father! She saw his long thin back stooping over a tiny magnolia tree which he had planted under the south wall. Like a seven-branched candlestick in a church it had looked, the second spring. The stiff, pale, upward-pointing flower-buds were set along the boughs like wax tapers: formal and holy it was, a little ecclesiastical tree.

  Why was it, she wondered, that all her endless daydreams went back to that vicarage and its associations for their background? They had moved to the Isle of Wight when her ailing father resigned his living. She was nearly seventeen then, she had left school in order to look after him. They had lived at Freshwater for five years; the only events of her life—the war, the first appearance of Tom (in naval uniform), her father’s death in the month of the armistice—had taken place there; but she scarcely ever thought of it, and the images it summoned to her mind were few and dim.

  “Really,” she thought, “leaving the vicarage was the beginning of my going to pieces.” The further she had emerged into the world from that loved shelter and protection, the more her essential weakness of character, her reluctance to deal with responsibilities, her inability to cope with daily duties, had become manifest; and little by little, in her idleness and stagnation, the visual sensibility which had inspired her childhood had petered out.

  There was Tom now, opening the gate. She smiled to him from the window, and she saw how his eye lightened, his step hastened at her greeting.

  Funny old Tom, she thought, kind Tom: he had been very good to her lately, given her her medicine and rushed home from the office at lunch-time to see that she was all right. One ought to be thankful for a good steady husband.

  He came into the room quite eagerly, saying:

  “Better?”

  “Much, much better.”

  “Oh, good for you! I am so glad, Gracie.”

  He put his arm round her shoulder and gave it a cheerful squeeze, and she did not have her usual impulse to move away from him.

  “You’ve had a rotten time,” he said sympathetically. “But this weather’ll soon put you right.”

  The same words, she thought, in almost the same tone. She wondered what the spring meant to him, what thoughts were in his head; and all at once she had an impulse of pity for him. He was forty-five.

  “Yes,” she said. “I went out and sat in the Park. It was delicious.”

  “That’s right. You must get out as much as you can.”

  He thought to himself: “She ought to get away into the country.”

  “Look here,” he said. “What about our holiday?” He took out his engagement-book. “Let’s see. I’ve got a whole lot of fixtures these next two months. Meetings, et cetera. Golf—cricket club. … You know they’ve put me on the committee now.” He turned the pages importantly. “But after the first week in August I might …”

  She interrupted with a sort of cry:

  “Oh, Tom!” She coloured a little and went on almost impetuously: “I want to go away by myself.”

  His first thought was that he had not heard her say a thing in that tone of voice for years.

  And in the end, after he had looked blank, felt hurt, proposed various south coast resorts to which he would willingly accompany her, stressed the expense of the journey, suggested that it would “look funny,” he had to say that of course she must do as she liked.

  But what, he wondered, what in the world was he to do? He could not imagine.

  He was going to miss Mother very much this year; but he would not, could not tell Grace this. Sympathy was not her strong point. …

  He dreamed sometimes of an ineffably tender, womanly woman, some one who would ever listen, admire, console. Mother had not been that exactly, but she’d always stood up for him, been proud of him: she’d been a good mother to him. …

  He was getting old. There was nothing before him really—no one who cared about his troubles.

  But by the time they went in to supper he was restored to cheerfulness. It was not such a bad idea of Grace’s, after all—a bit of a holiday on one’s own might be quite enjoyable … a bachelor again … not so old after all—not so bad-looking either. He might wander round—look up some old pals. He might …

  Over the fish pie he considered several possibilities.

  “My
dear,” said Clare, as they walked away, “what nostalgia.”

  “What what?”

  “Heimweh.”

  “What?”

  “But I really thought you were introducing me to the housemaid—till she spoke. Her voice was nice. Why must people wear such misbegotten clothes? She wasn’t bad-looking really. … Poor thing.”

  “Mm. She’s rather a comic, isn’t she? Her husband’s a manager in the office—a bluff old bounder with a paunch. Enough to make any one take a gloomy view, I should think.” He added: “Lucky I didn’t cut her. Can’t think how I managed to recognize her. I haven’t seen her since the winter.”

  And he described his tea-party with a grin.

  “Do you mingle much in Society?” she asked.

  He laughed.

  “Not much. I’ve dined out a few times—met some of the local snobs and magnates—Uncle Lionel’s friends—played bridge—that sort of thing. … And I’ve attended several football matches on Saturday afternoons. And I go to the movies with one of the clerks in the office: when he’s feeling the devil of a chap he takes me on to the local dancing-­hell, and we pick up a partner apiece and drink lemonade and dance divine waltzes with all the lights dimmed.”

  He thought suddenly of the little creature Pansy whom he had seen there once, sitting alone, very ladylike, sipping coffee. She had looked at him hard, unsmilingly, out of her minute white face. He had thought “I’ll go and dance with her soon.” He had been in good form that night. When next he thought of looking for her, a burly foreign-looking gentleman had claimed her. He saw them going out together.

  He added:

  “It’s a rotten life. Still, one manages to get some amusement out of it. And I generally get away weekends. … Let’s take one more turn round the Park.”

  “Don’t let me be late,” she said. “Norah has a meal at seven-thirty.”

  “Oh, that’s all right. They’ll wait,” he said airily; adding, as they set off again: “You know, I suppose I ought to do something about all these people.”

  “Do what?”