‘There is no need to be so violent,’ she said.
‘Why have you sent them to such a … such a …’
‘What!’ she cried, enlightened. ‘Have they written to you? Little monkeys! May I see?’
Smiling, yet a little displeased, she held out a hand for the letters, and, after a brief hesitation, he gave her Paulina’s. She laughed, quite kindly, as she read it.
‘Poor darlings! It’s rather hard, I do admit. But they must learn to put up with it. They must become civilised beings, you know, if they are to live in a civilised world. And this process, though painful, is probably as quick as any.’
‘Why should they live in a civilised world, as you call it?’
‘Don’t be unreasonable. You know as well as I do that an uncivilised world is no place for them. Think of Tony!’
He found this unanswerable. Thinking of Tony, he had formerly given them advice which he now regretted. It was true that he had himself encouraged them to go to Cleeve. Florence was demanding to see Teresa’s letter, in a determined way.
‘Oh, well,’ he mumbled, withholding it, ‘it says the same thing.’
‘I’d like to see it, please.’
He gave it up. She frowned over it, but gave it back quite safely with the comment:
‘Not quite so artless, I’m afraid. Paulina is at least sincere, don’t you think?’
‘So is Tessa sincere.’
‘Not altogether. She pretends to be writing to tell you not to come. Why does she write at all then? She knows she’s no business to do it. I’m sure that Paulina never thought that she oughtn’t. But Teresa has some feeling in the back of her mind that she wants to hide.’
‘Has she?’ asked Lewis, beginning to re-read the letter with interest. ‘I don’t think Tessa could hide anything.’
‘I think,’ she suggested, ‘that I wouldn’t answer them if I were you. Or just send them a cheery picture postcard.’
‘I shall do no such thing,’ he exclaimed, angrily aware of a hint of coercion in her manner. ‘I shall write and advise them to run away if they don’t like it.’
‘Don’t be absurd! I must ask you not to do anything so silly. I’ve taken the responsibility for those girls and I’m sure my father would agree with me. They oughtn’t to be encouraged to feel sorry for themselves.’
‘I can’t help what you and your father think. I knew Tessa and Lina before you did.’
‘Still, they can’t be so much to you that you would deliberately go against me in this matter? Because, you know, I shall feel it strongly, very strongly indeed, if you insist upon writing to them after what I’ve said.’
Something in the gentle decision of her tones had a dreadful effect on his temper. They were both very angry, for behind the dispute lay deeper issues than they cared to admit. Teresa aroused in him a devotion, and in her a dislike, which neither fully realised. At last, with a furious exclamation, he seized his hat and flung out of the room, slamming the door behind him. It was their first quarrel.
For a few minutes she was quite dazed. Then she smiled and murmured to herself:
‘Dear me! What a hullabaloo!’
And soon afterwards she said firmly:
‘He’ll have got over it when he comes in.’
She finished brushing her hair and sat still, thinking. It was really time that she took stock of herself and her position. This explosion was significant of a sort of uncertainty, a hesitation of mind, which had grown on her in the past weeks. She must think; she must think about herself and Lewis. Only that was difficult when he had so completely mastered her imagination. Always he was in her mind, but not rationally; the idea of him had grown so large that it blotted out everything else. Before they married she remembered that she used to think about him a great deal. She had seen him clearly though mistakenly. Since then he had changed into quite another person and she saw him clearly no more. Their closer intimacy had brought about a regrettable want of focus. Her old values were lost, her sense of proportion submerged by the cataclysmic new things that had happened to her, and she would have liked ideas of some sort to follow upon this process. But she had none. It was as if he had picked her up and carried her off to some strange place where there were no standards left by which to judge him. Nor did she rebel against this, when they were together; in his arms she could see her lost world crumble away and remain serene. But, in her hours alone, she would search, rather frightened, for a new self. Once she could say very confidently why she loved him. Now she was hardly sure of anything about him, or about herself, save that he had possessed her. This isolated fact was so absorbing that she could not see round it.
As she slowly dressed for supper she told herself that, for both their sakes, she must recover some measure of poise and detachment. She must get rid of this pliant languor which had in some ways made their relations so easy, but which was a bad foundation for rational partnership. A determination seized her to get back to England as soon as possible. In England she would be reinforced by her own background.
She waited for him and, as he did not come, she went down and ate her supper alone. Then she came up and sat for a long time on the balcony listening to the sea. Quite late, when she was thinking of going to bed, she heard him come in, and called to him. He came out at once and stood beside her, leaning on the edge of the balcony. In the pale starlight he looked strange, wild, almost exhausted, but she did not think that he was still angry. He put a hand on her shoulder and asked in a low voice:
‘Well? What have you been doing?’
‘Listening to the sea,’ she said.
He listened too for a few seconds. Then he shivered and exclaimed almost in a whisper:
‘It’s cold. Come in!’
‘I’m not cold. Have you caught a chill?’
‘I hate this balcony!’
Still grasping her shoulder he leaned forward and looked down into the garden. An owl hooted in the thickets and he jerked back, his nervous clever fingers tightening their clutch. For all those hours he had been thinking of Tessa, away in England, shut up, beating her untamed little spirit against prison bars. Soon he was going to England himself, near to her. A conviction that he had better not came upon him so strongly that he exclaimed aloud:
‘Don’t let’s go!’
‘Go where? What do you mean?’
‘England. Let’s stay here. We’d better not go.’
‘My dearest boy! I’ve bought the house!’
‘Couldn’t you get rid of it?’
‘Lewis! You’re moonstruck! It’s quite impossible!’
‘Oh, very well!’ he yielded with an odd defensive gesture. ‘It’s your doing. Come in! Come to bed.’
She did not reopen the question of the children’s letters since that might sound like nagging. So she left it, almost sure that he would not write. And in this confidence she was justified. Perhaps he forgot, or perhaps he did not know what to say; but Teresa and Paulina awaited his answer in vain, shedding many salt tears, night and day, in their bitter exile at Cleeve.
14
The music-room was the most important of all the rooms in the new house. Here Florence put a beautiful piano and a good writing-desk and comfortable chairs and a waste-paper basket which Lewis never used. Then she turned him loose into it, with an assurance that it should be entirely his own, and that nobody should ever clean it. For this he was not properly grateful, having forgotten the ways of housemaids.
‘Clean it?’ he said. ‘I should hope not! Roberto never cleans anything.’
Good little Roberto had attached himself to Florence and Lewis when Sanger’s circus was broken up. During the honeymoon he had gone on a holiday to see his relations, and then he came to England to do the housework at Strand-on-the-Green. He was, so Florence said, more useful than three maids put together and much pleasanter to deal with. He did all the work, with the help of a charwoman who came in the mornings.
‘He’s exactly the kind of servant I’ve always wanted
,’ said Florence. ‘Really feudal. He gives the right tone to the house.’
‘The right tone?’ said Lewis in a puzzled voice. ‘Scaramello? I don’t quite see what you mean, but he looks very fine now you’ve cleaned him up.’
‘He’s the sort of servant we ought to have. He goes so well with the sort of effect I want to produce.’
‘Why should you want to produce any sort of effect?’
‘One does produce a definite impression on people, whether or not one makes any conscious efforts about it, so one might as well take pains, and think a little. I want this house to look like us … pleasantly Bohemian … a sort of civilised Sanger’s circus, don’t you know, with all its charm and not quite so much … disorder.’
Lewis looked very doubtful.
‘I don’t see how you’re going to do it, Mrs Dodd, and anyhow it’s a queer ambition for a respectable married woman.’
‘You think of nothing but respectability these days.’
I daresay,’ he said lightly, ‘I’m a reformed rake.’
And he fled to his music-room, leaving her to do what she liked with the rest of the house. It seemed to him that she was oddly changed since their return to England. It had begun on their journey home; as they sped northwards she had become more assured and domineering with every mile. She grew brisker and more decisive; she spoke more quickly. Still, she was very good to him. She took charge of everything, protected and shielded him in all disturbances, and provided this charming room where he could retreat from the racket which went on in the rest of the house. Here he worked through the shortening Autumn days, emerging at intervals for food, to find his wife, competent and commanding, generally at the top of a stepladder. They went sometimes for little walks along the towing-path or to Kew Gardens, and he admitted that Strand-on-the-Green was really a delightful spot. But of his new quarters, as a whole, he took so little notice that he sometimes lost his way about the house. He was quite unable to describe it to the Birnbaums, who had taken, for the Winter, a large furnished house in Lexham Gardens. He went to see them as soon as they arrived and sat with them for a long time, smoking Jacob’s cigars and exchanging gossip of the Sanger world in which this young pair had been cutting a great figure. Antonia was most anxious to know how he did with Florence.
‘Very well,’ he told her. ‘She’s a model wife.’
‘Have you quarrelled yet about anything?’
‘Oh, no. I’m so firm, you see.’
They laughed at this and asked what he was firm about.
‘Well, there’s the little question of my family. She’s strangely anxious that we shall all be brought together, and since we came home she’s struck up a sort of friendship with my sister. Ever met my sister, Ike?’
‘I have not had that pleasure, I’m afraid.’
‘Well, that’s natural, for she’s your social superior; a knight’s daughter and married to a baronet’s heir. But you needn’t regret it, for she’s as ugly as sin. Toothy, you know, and pop-eyed. And a tongue like a horse radish, as Florence will discover before she’s much older. Anyhow, over that I’ve been firm. I won’t have her in the house. If I receive her, I don’t know what lengths they might go. It might be my father next!’
‘Your father! Does he clamour to be received?’
‘Well, not exactly,’ confessed Lewis. ‘But Florence has seen him, and she tells me that I’m in danger of his free forgiveness if only I’ll apologise for my language last time we met. So you see the ice is thin!’
‘What occurred when you last met?’ asked Jacob, who had always been curious to know. ‘Did he oppose your musical career?’
‘Oppose it!’ cried Lewis. ‘I wish he had! No, it was his encouragement that drove me into being a prodigal.’
‘I see. He knew too much about it? That happens sometimes.’
‘He knows too much about everything. He had to, I suppose, being a school inspector. But I didn’t object as long as he left my department alone. I could put up with his bloody little text-books and what his dear friend, the archbishop, said to him coming out of the club, as long as he didn’t interfere with me. When he did, I had to go away.’
‘He has written your pieces for you?’ asked Jacob with a grin.
‘I declare I wouldn’t put it past him! But he didn’t get as far as that. I made my protest when he had the amazing impudence to purloin a thing of mine and show it to Simon, for his opinion, apparently! Simon!’
‘Simon! You mean Lucius Simon?’
‘But certainly. There’s only one of him, I should hope.’
‘One is too many,’ said Jacob gloomily.
Thus they dismissed a man who was still the most renowned of British composers. In their circles, however, Lucius Simon was hardly considered worth a malediction. He was, perhaps, the wrong age.
‘Simon,’ Lewis explained, ‘was one of my father’s friends. Bound to be! An obscene, loathsome, complacent, self-advertising maggot if ever there was one! Just the sort of fellow my father would take to. Plenty of them at our house; and all so hearty and gentlemanly, don’t you know, all busy building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land, and doing well out of it. No, don’t laugh, Tony! You think that’s Ike’s job? I tell you, you’ve no idea what these people are like. I hadn’t noticed the thing was gone from my room (it wasn’t much of a thing, you know, only boy’s work) till the old man sent for me one evening, and there, in the library, I found Simon puffing at his cigar and digesting his dinner. I nearly vomited at the sight of him. And then I saw my manuscript in his pudgy paws, and my father said: “I’ve sent your little Sonata to Mr Simon, Lewis (he was mister then) to see if he could make anything of it for you. You’ll find his suggestions very helpful.” Simon! And they handed it back to me with his filthy scrawls all over it, as if they were giving me a thousand pounds! And Simon said I had some powers and a gift for melody. Simon!’
‘So you have,’ said Jacob. ‘But you are afraid of it. Before I have always wondered why that is. Now I know that it is Simon. You were foolish, Lewis. He could have done so much for you. I suppose you insulted him?’
‘Of course he had influence. My father knows nobody who hasn’t. No. I kept my temper remarkably well. I merely threw the thing into the fire and walked out of the room.’
‘Just quite quietly, like that,’ explained Tony, and Lewis had to laugh, remembering how he had stalked off, with all the fiery, outraged vanity of art and youth combined, and slammed the door upon two flabbergasted gentlemen.
‘Next day,’ he said, ‘I spoke my mind. I’d been wanting to do that for seven years. Then I ran away.’
‘And that is the story of your life,’ murmured Jacob. ‘I have often wondered. Your wife … does she know?’
Lewis reflected and said that he did not think so.
‘If she knew, she would tell you, as I do, to be wise and forget it. Now he is willing to forgive you. Why is that?’
‘Oh, because I’ve married so well. I never realised, you know, that he’d be so pleased. If I’d known … oh, well, I’d have done just the same I suppose. But it riles me to think how he’s probably going round telling everybody that he always knew I would sow my wild oats and settle down. But he shan’t set foot in my house, unless it’s over my corpse.’
‘I thought it was Florence’s house,’ said Tony, puzzled.
‘Oh, well, it is really. But I’m master in it.’
‘What is it like? Is it as nice as this?’
‘Oh, well …’ he looked round at the disordered magnificence of the room where they sat: ‘No, it’s not as grand as this.’
‘Can I come and see it? Shall I come tomorrow?’
‘No, don’t come tomorrow. Come sometime when she’s at home. She’s gone away to Cambridge, to her father.’
‘Gone back to her father! But not for always?’
‘Oh, no? Only for a weekend. We’ve not parted.’
Antonia, who still could not believe that Florence and Lewis we
re really happy together, looked dubious. She said:
‘Tell me when she comes back and I’ll go and see her. And she must come and see me. Do you like this house? Jacob took it. It belongs to a friend of his; he collected all these Gainsboroughs. But I don’t like having a house. It’s a bother. You can be just as comfortable in your own suite in an hotel. But we thought we’d better because I’m going to have a baby in the Spring. Did you know?’
‘That’s excellent news. I congratulate you, Tony.’
‘You’d better congratulate Jacob. It’s as much his doing.’
‘I congratulate you, Ike.’
‘Have a cocktail!’ said Jacob expansively.
‘He says,’ murmured Antonia, ‘that a boy with my brains and his money may get anywhere.’
‘My cherished one! I said your father’s brains.’
‘Yes. But that’s not tactful. Myself, I feel I might have a daughter with Sanger’s disposition and Jacob’s appearance.’
‘These,’ said Lewis, ‘are morbid fears natural to your condition. You must get rid of them. I’m drinking his health!’
Until dusk he lingered with them, enjoying the stuffy comfort of the room, with its rich heavy hangings and soft carpet and chairs like little feather beds. He told them about his new Concerto and offered to send it to them. But they, who preferred listening to reading, made him play some of it to them. Their approval seemed to please him very much.
‘Florence thinks it a great advance on the “Revolutionary Songs”,’ he told them.
He added, seeing that they were amazed at this quotation of an alien opinion:
‘She’s very interested in music, you know. Really, she seems to have heard a lot.’
‘Du lieber Gott!’ exclaimed Jacob, when Lewis had left them. ‘Tony! What is to become of that poor fellow? When did one hear Sanger quote the opinion of any of his women?’
‘My mother was musical,’ said Antonia thoughtfully.
‘Musical!’
Jacob again called upon the God of the Patriarchs to witness the accursedness of ladies who were musical. It was a pity that Florence could not hear him.
The Constant Nymph Page 18