This house now filled up all her letters to her father. It was at Strand-on-the-Green, and had belonged to one of her many school friends. She had always thought it the most delightful house in the world, and, hearing that it was for sale, she wired to Charles to secure it for her. He bought it about three weeks after her marriage. She was quite sure that it would exactly accommodate herself and Lewis. It was easily accessible, and yet sufficiently out of urban distractions. When their position was quite assured they might live right out in the country, and people should come and stay with them, but at present it was advisable to be near the scene of action. It was a very old house, with a romantic history dating back to Charles II, and a walled garden with a mulberry tree. In this garden a large studio had been built, connected with the house by a covered passage; this was to be the music-room, where Lewis was to exist, beautifully undisturbed. Also there was a long, lovely chamber on the first floor, looking out over the river, which was to be the drawing-room.
Florence knew every hole and cranny of the building and had already furnished it completely in her mind’s eye. For this occupation she had plenty of leisure, for Lewis left her alone a great deal. He was working with as much ease and regularity as he had ever achieved in his life. Marriage seemed to have restored his scattered wits. He had recovered completely from the shock of Sanger’s death, was able to sleep soundly at night, and could think of nothing but his Concerto. Florence was delighted. This work was as important in her eyes as it could be in his; nor did she feel herself neglected, for he was perfectly affectionate when his mind came, as it were, to the surface. She liked solitude and the company of her own thoughts; at this time she almost craved for it, feeling a need to consolidate and preserve that separate and individual outlook on life which even a wife should have, and which often grew shadowy in their unreal, happy hours together. She wanted to get rid of a new uncertainty, a sensation of never knowing her own mind about anything.
Sometimes he would leave his work and they would wander over the terraced hills at the back of the little town; he idly enjoying himself – she attempting continually to build up a solid foundation of understanding between them. She could have wished that he would be a little more interested in the house. She described to him the charms of the district, the delightful cottages tucked away under Kew Bridge, the towing path, and the barges and the swans and Zoffany House. But he persisted in saying, a little absently, that he didn’t mind where he lived. They might have been doomed to Queen’s Gate.
‘Do you really not care what sort of place you live in?’ she asked him once.
‘I like this place,’ he replied, ‘as well as any.’
They were sitting on the stone parapet of a vineyard, high up on the hills, a low wall covered with mosses and small flowers. She had taken off her hat and flung it some yards away on the grass. The southern breezes, warm and aromatic, ruffled the soft hair on her forehead, but she looked, as always, very neat and trim. Lewis was perched on the wall just behind her, his feet dangling over the edge. He was busy throwing little pebbles to see how far they would bounce down hill. Beneath them were the huddled yellow walls and roofs of the town and a few fishing boats drifted over the dazzling bay waters. All was as still and brilliant as a mirage.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘This is the South. I know. But it’s poppy and mandragora, you know.’
‘It’s what?’
‘It makes one lazy. The long sunny days here induce a feeling of leisure which we northern people can’t have. I’m sure our efficiency and all that sort of thing is due to the shortness of our daylight. We know our days are limited. The night is such a deplorable waste of time, don’t you think?’
‘Not always,’ observed Lewis, hurling a pebble which broke the record.
‘But it is,’ said Florence earnestly. ‘Think how much of our valuable lives we waste in sleeping!’
Lewis rejoined with a comment which made her blush, just a little. He came round and sat on the wall in front of her, to see her doing it. He liked to say things which put her out of countenance, and did so infrequently enough that she was always taken by surprise.
The contradictions of her temperament were a perpetual source of amusement to him. She still had sudden alarmed withdrawals which delighted him and provoked him to experiment. She was so responsive and yet so shy, combined so much candour with such reticence, that he seemed to pursue long after he had captured her.
She picked a sprig of thyme off the wall, rubbed it between her fingers, and sniffed at it as she reverted to the house.
‘Moving in will be simple,’ she told him, ‘for I know exactly what I want, down to the last window curtain.’
‘Can you always get what you want?’ he asked in some amazement.
‘Oh, yes! It’s simply a matter of being firm. In the drawing-room I want the brightest colour to be those lustre jugs I told you about. The permanent decorations ought to be subdued, because the light … Lewis! Stop throwing stones! I don’t believe you’ve listened to a single word I’ve been saying!’
‘Yes, I have. You were talking about jugs. I’m listening. I’m listening to you and a dozen other things as well.’
‘There aren’t a dozen other things. There’s only … the chapel bell, and some men shouting in the boats down on the quay … and a dog barking, and some ducks in the garden below.’
‘Not bad! You’ve missed about fifty larks in the sky, and the grasshoppers all round us, and a car changing gear on the hill, and the oars in the rowlocks of that boat putting out, and the children playing, and the goat bells away on the hill behind us, and I think I can hear a smithy.’
‘What a babel it sounds! I’d have said it was a quiet evening.’
‘So it is. It’s so quiet that you can hear every sound in it. Generally there’s too much noise for that. But come along, my girl! Put on your hat! The sun is setting and one of these short nights we have here is about to begin.’
‘Oh, dear! I don’t want to go down. This place smells of myrtle and our inn smells of garlic.’
He went and picked up her hat and clapped it on her head. They began to pick their way down the hill, arm-in-arm.
‘I used to wonder,’ she said suddenly, ‘what Albert Sanger and my aunt used to talk about, that time they ran away to Venice. Do you think they counted up the number of sounds they could hear?’
‘Sanger? Oh, I shouldn’t think so. He always maintained that women were three-quarters deaf.’
‘He couldn’t have thought that of her. She was very musical.’
‘Oh, musical!’ said Lewis vaguely, as if this had nothing to do with the discussion.
His memory cast very little light on the career of Evelyn Sanger, though Florence had questioned him more than once. What he did say was disappointing. Evelyn had not impressed him. He did not think her beautiful or brilliant or fascinating. But he admitted that she was clever at getting Sanger out of scrapes and putting a good face on scandals. She was not as able as Linda, however, in dealing with duns. She had dwindled, it seemed, into a small souled, careworn creature, overburdened with children and defeated by the petty, material side of life. Perhaps her vision was not quite wide enough; it had failed, anyhow. But then, Sanger was a brute. Even Lewis said so.
‘If it had been me,’ thought the niece indignantly, ‘I should have left him. I wouldn’t have dreamt of putting up with it It’s … it’s degrading … clinging to a man who behaved like that. She could have had no pride.’
In the streets of the town it was already getting dusk. They went carefully through smells and refuse, down the steep hill and under massive archways, to their little inn just above the quay. In the dark of their room they found letters from England awaiting them, glimmering whitely on the dressing-table. Lewis took his out on to the balcony where the last gleams of daylight lingered. He had a fat envelope with two letters inside it and he laughed aloud as he scanned the first:
DEAR LEWIS,
Will you please com
e and take us away from here? It is a disgusting school and we have endured it as long as we are able. Really and truly we’ve tried to put up with it, because Tessa said one ought to give everything a fair trial, but it doesn’t and we can’t. It isn’t like what you said it would be. We would never have come if we had known what it would be like. We shall kill ourselves if we are not soon taken away; we cannot exist here, it is insufferable. The Girls are hateful, they say we don’t wash and are liars. The governesses are a Queer Lot and not fitted to be teachers I’m sure. They think of nothing but games. Why should we have to play games if we don’t like? Would you like it? Work is sensible, we don’t mind that. It was your fault that we were persuaded to come, so you will be a murderer if you don’t take us away before we end our miserable Lives. When Florence wrote to say we must stay because it’s good for us our hearts broke and all the house rang with our frantic lamentations. Could you come and take us out to tea? They’d let you if you said you were married to her. And then we could all go to the Station and take some train that goes a long way off. We have nobody to help us only you, and as the Poet says: On some fond Breast the parting soul relies! Do, do, DO come, DEAR Lewis. You will not be sorry when you hear our joyful ejaculations.
Your Sincerely friend,
PAULINA ELOISE SANGER.
PS. Probably we shall hang ourselves.
PS. Tessa says I’m to say she won’t. She says that I can if I like, but she won’t on any account because it is a Mug’s Game. But it’s not as bad for her as she doesn’t have to play this hellish hockey because she has a valvular lesion. They found it at the medical inspection, so she has to go for walks. I forgot to say we hope your having a nice time and like being married. Tony does. She is coming to England this Winter. She sent us a picture postcard that the Girls said was common. Caryl did too. He is playing in a cinema.
When Lewis had finished reading this letter he swung round to call in through the window to Florence that the girls were unhappy at school and must be removed. Then he remembered that Paulina had said something about Florence having written. It was the first he had heard of it! Queer! He looked at the letter again and saw that the envelope contained another from Teresa. He began to read:
Lina threatens to write, so I think I’d better take up my pen too, that I may warn you not to pay too much attention to her. I don’t think she will kill herself, she is not nearly brave enough. Reflect upon her character and consider if I am right! You need not worry to come and take us away if it’s inconvenient to you, since no fatal consequences will befall.
But I must confess that we don’t find ourselves very comfortably situated in this school. We don’t mean to stay for another term. But I think we can endure it till Christmas. There are a lot of people here who I think you would laugh to see. I do often. But it’s really a waste of time for us to be here. We would learn more in some other place where they didn’t play games perhaps.
I can’t write very well, because I’m frantic, because a girl called Mary Marlowe is in this room playing Jardins sous la pluie FFFFF! This isn’t her fault, because no person is allowed to play anything properly in this school. If they do, Miss Somers says: What are you putting in the expression for? You can’t put in the expression till I’ve told you what to put. In the room next door another girl called Naomi Hooper is playing the Sonata Pathétique. She is putting in the expression, and I wish to God that she wouldn’t. The noise is filthy and infernal.
They hate us, and we hate them. When we come in, they all stop talking and whisper. We don’t ever get away from them. A person has to be alone sometimes, but truly the only place where you can be alone here is the lavatory, which is not very comfortable, and they come rattling at the door if you stay there too long. We go there when we cannot conceal our tears. Our chief business is to be always running as there is some place, on a time table, that we must be in every minute of the day, and these places are often far apart, and no allowance is made for transit. I know now why you ran from your school.
With kind regards,
Your Very Dear TESSA.
It had grown so dark before Lewis had finished reading that he could scarcely decipher the last words. When he had done, he stood for a moment with a perfectly blank mind, staring out to sea. This unstudied letter had brought her so forcibly to his imagination that she might almost have stood beside him. She had breathed a hasty confidence into his ear, a caressing farewell, called herself his very dear Tessa (and she was! God knew how dear!) and then, suddenly, she was quite gone, vanished into the shadows.
He leant over the balcony and looked fixedly into the odd, ill-kept little garden beneath, as though amid its tangled thickets and the blackness of its cypresses he might catch the whisk of her petticoats. But he saw nothing and heard nothing save the sea whispering on the beach. And he became aware that the gathering night was inexpressibly melancholy – empty. He was desolate because of the vast, aching sorrow of the water, pale as mother-of-pearl, smooth as glass, where a few black boats still hovered. On the horizon purple clouds collected slowly, and from the stumpy tower at the end of the quay a yellow path of light came to him across the dim expanses of the sea. It was all sad. In the whole of this cool, limpid evening there was nothing of her and he had been bereft, robbed. Her letter, crushed in his hand, was a dead thing, powerless to charm her back. Florence called, in a clear low voice, from the room behind him.
‘Did you speak, Lewis?’
He thought that he must have exclaimed. Perhaps he had called on his friend, a little imploringly, in the darkness.
‘No,’ he said confusedly. ‘No.’
And he went back into the room.
His lady wife sat in front of the dressing-table, where two tall wax candles burned on either side of the looking-glass. She was brushing her hair with soft, rhythmical movements and did not at once turn round. All that he could see was a fine dark cascade of hair, touched at the edges to a golden haze by the candle light. It hid her face and shoulders. Presently she glanced at him and asked in surprise if he had seen a ghost. He said that he had not. But his look of blank discovery did not immediately disappear. The dressing-table was all covered with little boxes and bottles and brushes and her rings, winking in the candle light. She took them off, when she did her hair, all except her wedding ring, which shone, bland and smooth, on her left hand. He looked at it, and at her, as though he saw them for the first time. She was so solid, so inevitably established there, that she seemed to deny the memory of the little wraith on the balcony.
‘I’ve had a letter …’ he began.
‘So have I,’ said his wife. ‘From your sister.’
‘Millicent?’ His brow grew dark. ‘Again?’
‘Again! Then you did get it?’
‘Get what?’
‘Her first letter. She says she wrote in June, when she saw our marriage in the paper. But as she got no answer she fears it never reached you.’
‘Yes, it reached me. I tore it up.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t want to have anything to do with her.’
‘I don’t think that is very reasonable. Her letter to me is very friendly. She wants us to come and see her when we are in England. Read it.’
He took the note, disgustedly, and read it through,
‘She’s up to no good,’ he commented. ‘But I can’t quite see what she’s after. What does she get by this sudden friendliness?’
‘Couldn’t it be genuine good nature?’
‘No, it couldn’t. She never had an ounce of it in her life. But why can’t she leave us alone?’
He simply could not understand these advances. He had married Florence without ever formulating to himself any clear idea as to her social position; at first he had thought of her as Tessa’s cousin, and, later, as the object of his own desires, but never as a Churchill and the daughter of the Master of St Merryn’s. In his simplicity he supposed that she was not grand enough to be an asset to anybody. She talked a great d
eal about her friends, but they all had names unknown to him, and he did not realise that Millicent might have found them impressive.
Florence herself had vague suspicions of the truth, but, in her anxiety to be reconciled with Lewis’s family, she preferred to ignore them. Already she had managed to forget that at college she had avoided an intimacy with Millicent Dodd with very considerable difficulty. She said firmly that she should answer the letter, and his expression, on hearing this, goaded her to carry the battle a step further.
‘I think you should have told me when first she wrote. One acquires an interest in relatives, when one marries.’
‘Is that so?’ he took her up quickly. ‘You don’t tell me when Tessa and Lina write to you.’
‘My dear Lewis! That’s a perfectly different case.’
‘How is it different?’
‘Teresa and Paulina,’ she said with a flush, ‘write very silly letters which, for their own sakes, I should be sorry to show to anybody.’
‘I’ll engage they write better letters than Millicent. You can get the truth out of them, at least …’
‘Not always, I’m afraid. The world in general finds that they … shall we say … exaggerate a little.’
He stated his opinion of the world in general, rather forcibly, in terms which she had never heard used before. She asked, in some bewilderment, what he meant. Then she grew angry.
The Constant Nymph Page 17