Authors: Elizabeth Bowen
Unhandily retying the gate chain-knot, he split a finger-nail, which he showed her. ‘Oh dear,’Jane responsibly said, though at the same time measuring his legs, their costly extension of chalk-striped flannel under the wheel, as though she considered him big enough to have done better. Later: ‘Why this cousin,
always?’ Peregrine asked, flicking the Daimler right, down the castle turning. ‘Are you an orphan?’
‘No,’ she said, turning red.
‘Terence had a theory you had a father.’
‘A father
and
mother.’ She interposed a hand between his observation and her blush; but need not have—he had returned to profile. He accelerated, explaining: ‘I’m under orders.’
‘Why didn’t she send the chauffeur?’
‘Harris? He’s taken the van to Cork.’
‘Or come herself?’
‘Oh, Vesta’d hardly do
that.
And anyhow we’re not feeling too good today. As you’ll see, we are a trifle fussed.’ ‘Oh?’
‘One thing and another, you know; one and thing and another.’ Hedge-muffled miles went, negative, by, till once more he bestirred himself. ‘What d’you keep looking out for?’
‘There’s a white horse, often, on this road.’
‘Talking of that, a drink should do you good.’ Speed, so far as blind corners allowed, rose. ‘Tootle-oo,’ he said to himself sadly; then to her: ‘make any more hay today?’
‘No; I-‘
‘No, I expected not.—What
were
you up to?’
‘What you said.’
‘No, you were walking around in circles.’
‘Don’t you, ever?’
‘Somehow I never walk.’
‘Mayn’t you get fat?’
‘Somehow I never do.’ They approached the castle. ‘At one time,’ Peregrine volunteered, ‘I went round in circles a bit in my own mind.’
Pyramidal the flowers were upon the piano, their scent exhausting what was left of the air. Never could drawing-room have been more empty. Jane, brought in by Peregrine, helplessly dropped on to the white sofa—the tray must be where it was before, for he had proceeded in that direction: from behind her, ice-noises splintered her memory. ‘And for you—what?’ he wanted to know.
‘Nothing!’ she declared, over-loud, wildly, faced and confounded by the chimney-piece. Marble like a temple in a fever-swamp it stood, chilled off and haunted by the miasma—where, last night,
had
she rested her burning hand? Gone, gone, gone… The man in the room sighed, drank, sighed, put down his glass lingeringly. ‘You can’t,’ he said, ‘mean that—absolutely nothing?’
‘Why have I to be here?’
‘To come back? You were terrific last night—anyone tell you?’
‘My cousin supposed I was drunk.—Where
is
Lady Latterly, now I’ve come?’
‘She’ll be along,’ said Peregrine darkly. ‘Why? Don’t you like it here any more?’
‘Do you, always?’ cruelly she returned. She was on the middle edge of the sofa, pressing her elbows to her sides: each end, above her, overpowering cushions stacked themselves up into lady-effigies.
‘Suits me all right, more or less, on the whole,’ he supposed, lifelessly looking around his cage. ‘But a girl like you—a girl like you,’ he was moved to argue, ‘can’t possibly want absolutely nothing. I mean, can’t want
absolutely
nothing. Now, can you?’ He vacillated over the rugs and parquet till he stood behind her, over the sofa. She looked up, backwards, to see why; whereupon fatalistically he drooped lower until he kissed her. She let him finish, then drew away—on the whole, thoughtfully. ‘Somehow this is a thing I never do in a car,’ he said. ‘Do you?’
‘I don’t know, really.’
‘Unconcentrated sort of a girl you are, aren’t you?’ Reflectively he went off to look for his glass. ‘I’m a bit off form today, which is not unusual, which is just at well.—What ha
ve you
been doing?’
She seemed uncertain. ‘I went to sleep.’
‘Ever go to town?’
‘I watched my mother having her hair cut.’
‘But what don’t you know?’ he restlessly asked, roaming her way again glass in hand.
‘Anything—apparently.’
‘You should, you know, sometime. It cheers one up.’ He yawned.
‘You yawn,’ she said, ‘almost like my father.’
‘Frustration, isn’t it?—Certain you won’t?’
‘What?’
‘Not a martini?’
She thought again. ‘Might that make this the same room?’
‘As what?’
‘Last night.’
Peregrine thought it was worth trying. Jane, while he got to work with the shaker, put her fist to her forehead and lay back. She had been robbed, too short a time ago to have yet taken the measure of her loss. First, it had been the letters: their being gone had been a mystifying shock. Wakened by sounds of Maud in the afternoon, she had set out to visit them; though it had not been urgent, chiefly a reason for a stroll. In the sultry-scented inside of the elder, there the stone was, nothing at all to show it had been disturbed till she came to lift it—then, so completely no trace was to be found on the crushed-down, whitened roots of the grass that her first fear was,
had
they ever been there at all? Or, had they conjured themselves into nothingness?—or, stolen away by evaporation? Where, though, in that case, was her solid ribbon? No, no way out of it: she had had to know—vilely, the letters had been taken! But that, though bad, had been nothing more than the start, the foreshadowing of robbery to come. For the worst of loss is, when it at the same time is an enlightenment—that is what is not to be recovered from; ignorance cannot be made good. She had lost her father, and twice over—lost him in not having known him until she’d lost him, lost him in the instant of a beholding. Yes, and in that comprehensive view through the arch she’d not only blundered upon a man and woman but perceived the packet upon her mother’s wanton lap. Guy too, then, had finished his course here.
And come to nothing, her eyes told her—there in the lax dusk, under the incriminated shadow of the chestnut. Criss-crossed, the ribbon stayed as it was, white bow dishevelled, trifled with but no more. Disregarded, everything he had written! She’s had her revenge like anything, thought the girl—and, even while she looked, the trophy slid down the taut blue cotton of the dress, failed to be stopped by a careless hand, fell. Dust rose where it fell, in a little puff, as unnoticed Jane fled back the way she’d come.
Anybody’s game, she had thought, breathlessly slowing down into one of those pacing, far-ranging circles in whose course Peregrine had found her—anybody’s game! Though which of them, dead man and living girl, had been the player, and which the played-with? Either way, Jane seemed doomed to know that this dallying and being dallied-with had gone on long enough. The trouble was the aptitude for love—and, on top of that, hadn’t her mother said that one never knew when or what at he might not laugh? And as for the world, who knew when
it
might not start laughing behind its hand?… So here now was Jane, through the instrumentality of Peregrine (acting under orders) biting upon the void of the whole story in this void, staled, trite and denying drawing-room—a goodbye is not what it’s said to be, her mother’d said. Jane suffered nothing but dismay, but there are sometimes no bounds to that. She once or twice hammered with her fist, to keep whatever it was down—then, rearing imperatively up among the cushions, reached a hand out for the martini. ‘Do you think,’ she put it to Peregrine, ‘I could be a medium?’
‘Far better try a job in a shop.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I meant, without knowing?’
‘Or model, or something, or so on, couldn’t you?’ He brought the cocktail.
‘Or bewitched, could I somehow possibly be?’ She drank, looking past him out of a window—’Here’s,’ she said finally, ‘Lady Latterly.’ The chatelaine, wearing tapered slacks, was disappointedly trailing some delphiniums; she disappeared to ascend the steps, then entered. ‘Nobody ever told me!’ she exclaimed in her most persecuted tone, kissing Jane as though the moment for doing so were by now irretrievably gone. ‘I’ve been so wondering,’ she confessed, ‘whether you’d possibly be an angel—I do hope you’ve told her?’ she said to Peregrine. She shelved the flowers and wrung her hands. ‘Then this
is
the end—where do I begin?’
‘Ask her,’ suggested he, ‘if she knows Shannon.’
‘Well I don’t, anyway,’ said the girl.
‘But you must!’ cried Lady Latterly, ‘That airport.’
‘None of us fly.’
‘Well, you know,’ he said, ‘how people keep on arriving.’
‘Richard is not people,’ said Lady Latterly, dilating her nostrils. ‘He really feels things.’ She turned to Jane. ‘The thing is, I’ve had a telegram …’
‘Richard’s arriving, out of the blue, ha-ha. Tomorrow.’
‘Don’t be brutal, Peregrine.’
‘And tomorrow, Vesta is going racing.’
‘What I’m so afraid of,’ said Lady Latterly, sitting down and pulling at a knee of her slacks, ‘is that he’ll never feel quite the same again. Thousands of miles, to me, and then what?—no one. Not a face at the airport—when I was so, so fond of him.’
‘Vesta rather fears he may cut up. Be a bit stuffy, create, or so on.’
‘Might he?’ Jane asked.
‘Can’t say; I don’t know the type.’
‘He’s such a boy,’ bemoaned Lady Latterly, biting at the tip of a finger with a ring on it, one eye on Peregrine.
‘Why does one let things happen?’
He did not seem to know or, alas, care. Jane was left to say: ‘Still, you’ll send the car?’
‘No, Peregrine and I’ll need the car, you see. No, it comes down to Harris and that unkind van. Unless—’ added Lady Latterly, fixing Jane for an instant of concentrated suspense, ‘—unless
you
were an angel and went along?’
Kathie entered the Montefort kitchen from the yard, knocking sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. Her arms ached from the buckets by means of which, all afternoon, she had been assisting in scooping the shallow river up into the barrel of the water-cart. Everywhere having run dry above, the cart had had to make several journeys, down and up the zigzag track—she had run ahead while it creaked on its last ascent. Nothing did she like better than an emergency, the doing of work which was not her own—she came indoors again, now the fun was over, with something of a sinking of the heart. Trickily dark was it indoors, after hours out in the water glare—there, however, really was Miss Antonia, kaleidoscopic in tartan, in the act of trying to hook the lid off the range. The range kept its attacker back by radiating a massive heat, intolerable this afternoon, from every part of its rusted surface; and Miss Antonia had further hampered herself by taking to it the wrong, short poker. This, when Kathie came in, she hid behind her as though surprised in the act of murder. ‘What on earth do you want?’ she said.
To be asked what she wanted never put Kathie out; what she dreaded was, their asking what she was doing. Miss Antonia’s unwillingness to account for what
she
was doing was most interesting; for never had she been known to so much look into a pot or shift a kettle. The girl answered simply by making a bee line for the spring-water crock under the shelf, and thirstily gulping straight from the dipper. ‘It would parch you,’ she stated, patting her chest, ‘to keep at it handling water you couldn’t touch. The old cattle fouled what’s left in the river.—Will I do that for you, miss, whatever it is?’
‘No.’ Thrown out, as one is by a change of mind, queered in will, as one is by an intervention, Antonia stood fecklessly tossing the packet of letters in the air. ‘Read,’ she at random inquired, ‘can you?’
‘Never set eye on
those,’
declared Kathie, swiftly. Untying her sacking apron, she watched. ‘Miss, that’s a bit of ribbon you’d never burn?’
‘Who said I was going to burn anything?—Want it, to tie up your bonny brown hair?’
The idea sent Kathie’s hands round her head. ‘Well, I’d be glad of it, but that it’s Miss Jane’s.—Did you notice her making loops in the castle motor? They were at it when I was coming out of the wood.’ Kathie, in search of another apron, tugged in turn at each of the dresser drawers. ‘Fire’s the finish.’ She glanced at the dormant range. ‘If you spared the ribbon, mightn’t you still be sorry? It should have taken patience to write all
that
down. Whoever was it, I wonder, was so clever?’ The girl diverted the question by a look at herself in the small glass over the sink.
‘Mr Guy. You ever heard of him?’
‘No, miss,’ said Kathie in her most safe-side manner. ‘Unless I heard he was dead, poor man?’
‘You might have. His photograph’s in the hall.’
‘You took
that
one, miss?’
‘Oh dear no, alas.’
‘Then he should be one of the family?’
‘Owned this place.’
‘It’s a pity he was cut short.’ Kathie, however, spoke distractedly—she had made a professional rush at the kitchen table and was going over what was upon it. ‘Look at that,’ she burst out, ‘nobody took their tea! What became of them? I left the pot out, look, and the canister with it, and here they are, high and dry! What’s this mystery?—was there trouble?’