Late and Soon (10 page)

“Oh, but I did,” Valentine answered.

The gentle, candid manner in which she made the admission dumbfounded him completely.

He thought: “It's no good. I'm in love with her. I adore her.” And following on the conviction came its graceless, inevitable concomitant: “God, what a muddle! What a complicated, god-damned muddle!”

A clock chimed, startlingly audible in the silence, and Valentine said:

“It's late. Did you mean to do any work to-night?”

“No. I wanted to talk with you. When you went up to show Sedgewick his room, I was afraid you mightn't come down again. I was terrified you wouldn't.”

“But I wanted to,” returned Valentine, and he thought how far removed was the quiet, considered way in which she said it from the quality, to him detestable, implied in the odious word “coquettish”.

“I've talked to you a lot about myself, and you've listened so graciously — won't you tell me a little about what's happened to you, since the time in Rome?”

“In terms of actual happening, very little, and what there was, all came quite close together — between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one, really. When the war started my father sent my mother and me back to London and we took a flat in Sloane Street. It seems absurd now, but in spite of the war I came out in the way girls did then — one had to be presented at a Royal garden-party instead of at a drawing-room and so on — and I did some
very casual war work that really only meant getting to know other girls.”

Lonergan noticed her old-fashioned, oddly elegant pronunciation of the word and smiled at it.

She smiled back, in a shy, friendly way as though she understood what had amused and perhaps pleased him.

“I think my mother was afraid of my being at a disadvantage, because of having lived abroad so much. But all our relations were very kind and everyone was giving informal dances and parties, that were supposed to be for men home on leave, from the Front. I expect I had more fun, really, than I should have had before the war, doing the London season properly. Every girl I ever knew seems to have hated her first season.”

“You know,” said Lonergan, “that you're talking about a world of which I know absolutely nothing whatever? I don't mean — I've no need to tell you — that I'm not interested. But my own origin is so completely different — middle-class Irish. I know nothing whatever about the kind of background you're describing. Forgive me. I didn't want to interrupt you. Please go on. Were you happy, going to the dances and parties?”

“I was very young for my age. I think perhaps very young people aren't really happy but they always think that one day they're going to be. I used to feel quite certain that happiness of some marvellous kind must be waiting for me just round the corner.”

“Was it?”

“Well, no. I can't say that. I don't mean at all that my life has been an unhappy one.”

She paused.

Lonergan guessed that she was finding it difficult, for a moment, to go on.

He thought: “Give her time. She'll tell me,” and he remained motionless.

“I suppose by happiness I really meant falling in love and getting married. And that's what happened.”

Lonergan experienced the onslaught of a sharp, furious jealousy.

He had seen the portrait of Humphrey Arbell hanging in the hall, and he had — he now knew — assumed that Valentine had never been in love with him.

Keeping his voice carefully neutral, he said:

“You were very young, when you fell in love and married.”

“Nineteen. I met Humphrey when I went, to stay with his sister, Venetia Rockingham. Charlie — her husband — was in Palestine and she was using their house at Maidenhead as a convalescent home for officers. Humphrey was there. He was one of the wounded officers. There was a sort of glamour about them, you know—”

She broke off, and said with a kind of mirthful distress:

“What a thing to say! And yet it's perfectly true. That sort of glamour was responsible for a lot of love-affairs in the last war.”

“Of course.”

He would have liked to know whether it had been responsible for her marriage to Humphrey Arbell, but would assail her with no crude questions.

Presently she said:

“A week-end can be a very long while. Humphrey fell in love with me — and I thought about him a lot, and Venetia asked me to come back again the next week-end, and I did. It was really a very obvious and straight-forward affair I suppose — only one never feels that about oneself. Humphrey and I were engaged three weeks after we first met, and then he was given sick leave and we got married. We thought he was going back to the Front, but he never did. The Medical Board wouldn't pass him.”

Valentine stopped speaking, and again Lonergan refrained from breaking in on her train of thought.

When she turned towards him again it was, once more, to surprise him.

“Those are just facts, aren't they, and facts all by themselves convey so little. I could tell you that Humphrey and I came to live here when the war was over, and that I had two children — and you still wouldn't really know much about my life.”

“Were you happy?” he asked.

Valentine smiled suddenly at that, as though he had pleased her unexpectedly.

“That's the question I always want to ask people myself. I don't think men do, as a rule — I mean, want to know about that. I wasn't unhappy but I didn't ever want to think about happiness. That's the nearest I can get to explaining.”

“It's near enough,” Lonergan told her.

“What I minded most, when I was younger, was that life seemed so very uninteresting. I thought it oughtn't to be like that. I liked living in the country, and we had just enough money, and there were the children, and Humphrey and I got on together quite well. Perhaps that was really what was wrong. I thought — and I still think — it isn't nearly enough, just to get on quite well.”

“It isn't.”

“Humphrey was killed in a hunting accident, twelve years ago. Quite a lot of people told me I was sure to marry again. I used to think so, too. But no one ever asked me to and I stayed on here, and Reggie — my eldest brother — had to retire on half-pay, and came to live with me. And I thought it was important for the children that Coombe and I should always be there — something they could depend on, that didn't change. When I was a child I used to long for a settled home that would always be the same. But I don't know, really, that it made much difference to
them.
It seems to me now that I didn't realize they'd stop being children after a few years, and of course that's what has happened. Naturally. It would have happened anyway, only the war seems to have made it come suddenly. And even that's not really true.
Primrose has lived away from home ever since she was eighteen, practically.”

The mention of Primrose's name stabbed Lonergan with an acute discomfort. He moved quickly, noisily pushing apart the logs on the hearth with his boot.

Immediately, he was aware of a complete change in the atmosphere that had enveloped them all through their long conversation.

The logs, in falling apart, sent up a little volley of sparks of which one landed on the shabby, discoloured hearth-rug and Lonergan stamped it out.

The spell of the evening was broken.

“Good-night,” said Valentine. “I do hope you'll ask for whatever you want. Please tell me, if there's anything, won't you?”

“I will. Thank you.”

“I must go to bed. Good-night,” repeated Valentine.

Lonergan said good-night, and as she moved away he added:

“I'm so glad we've met again.”

She looked back at him and smiled, saying “I am too” with a sound of shyness in her voice that made her, more than ever, seem strangely youthful. He was glad of the words and yet he felt as though a chill had fallen upon their evening so that her going-away left him with a sense of desolation.

Valentine lay in bed, wakeful.

She felt stimulated as she had not felt for many years, and she was aware both of a new and precarious sense of happiness and of strange, inescapable pangs of pain related to all that Lonergan had told her about the house
at Saumur, Laurence, who had come to him and lived with him in Paris, and their child Arlette.

Neither happiness nor pain owed anything to the early love of Rory Lonergan and Valentine Levallois They had been two children, disappeared long ago into the lost world of childhood. Through half a lifetime they had all but forgotten one another. Neither had ever had any claim on the fidelity of the other.

So that it was, Valentine acknowledged to herself, on account of Lonergan as she had known him for the space of one evening that she lay awake now.

She recalled, word for word, things that they had said to one another, and she saw again certain expressions that had passed over his dark, intelligent face.

The look that had come into his eyes when he spoke of Laurence and said that only one word — luminous — could describe the quality of her beauty, was vividly before her in the darkness.

It brought with it the sharp, unpredictable and uncontrollable onslaught of jealousy.

Valentine thought, lucidly and with the realism that belonged to her: “I think I'm falling in love with him. Perhaps I am in love already,” and she remembered with a kind of astonished awe that both she and Lonergan were free to love as they chose.

The romantic miracle, in which she had all her life secretly believed, might come to pass.

The fourteen-year-old village girl, Esther, who bounced through the duties of housemaid and supplementary parlour-maid at Coombe and was so evidently convinced that she had nothing left to learn concerning them, called Valentine at half-past seven.

She slammed down a tray with a tiny early-morning tea service on it, pulled at the curtains and rattled up the blinds with noisy exuberance, and banged the door smartly behind her.

Valentine felt glad that the competent Madeleine always performed these offices for the General, that two soldier servants were responsible for her visitors and that Primrose was never called at all in the mornings.

She wished, as often before, that Primrose would allow breakfast to be taken up to her room.

At least, she reflectively told herself, it was nowadays no longer possible for Primrose to substitute for breakfast, and frequently for other meals as well, a succession of bananas, of which the skins, curling and discoloured, seemed always to be left lying about on pieces of furniture, mantelshelves and the edges of the bath.

Even three years ago Primrose had been fairly ready to regard her trail of banana skins as a household joke. Valentine had always felt that, with occasional references and mild jibings about the banana skins, she could still share a look or a smile with Primrose that momentarily lessened the strain in their relationship. Now, nothing at all could do that.

She had been terribly conscious on the previous evening that Primrose's hostility towards her had hardened. She felt that it was now something which Primrose had acknowledged and justified to herself, and would take no further pains to hide. Accustomed to stifle a misery for which she could nowhere find alleviation, Valentine made the effort of turning her mind away from it.

She went from her cold bedroom to the still colder bathroom, dressed as quickly as possible in a dark-blue knitted dress that she had always liked and went downstairs.

There she automatically noted the signs of Ivy's and Esther's light-hearted disregard of all but the more obvious of their morning duties: she straightened some of the chair-covers, turned off an electric light left burning unnecessarily, and pulled a leaf off the day-by-day almanack that stood on the desk.

It was Sunday morning.

Valentine remembered how punctually her father, as Sunday after Sunday came round, had quoted the line: “Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright.”

She herself, with equal punctuality, had recollected the triviality once a week for more than twenty years.

She went into the dining-room, shivered, and began to make the coffee.

Presently Ivy brought in toast and the breakfast-tray that Madeleine was waiting to take up to the General.

Valentine added what was necessary to it and Ivy went out and a minute or two later sounded the gong in the hall.

In a few minutes, Valentine told herself, she would see Lonergan.

She suddenly felt very young and very happy.

Almost immediately Lonergan and Captain Sedgewick came in together.

Valentine smiled at them both, telling young Sedgewick with genuine concern that he should have slept longer.

“Thanks very much, Lady Arbell, but I had a marvellous night. I feel fine. I can't tell you what it's like to be in a civilized home again after being in camp.”

The soldiers all said the same thing, and it always rang true.

She knew that both the men would be away from the house all day, but, remembering Jess, invited Sedgewick to join the tea and games that her younger daughter had projected for the evening.

“Mr. Banks, who was here the other day, is coming and he was to bring a friend with him.”

“Good old Buster,” said Sedgewick leniently.

“It's very kind of you to have them,” Lonergan told her. “They'll love it, poor lads.”

“Perhaps you'll be here, too?”

“In the office, I expect. Will you ever recognize that
charming little sitting-room under the name of the office, I wonder?”

Jess with unwonted punctuality came into the dining-room before breakfast was over. She wore, as usual, her riding-clothes and Valentine noticed that she had taken a great deal of trouble with the management of her hair.

“Hallo! Good-morning,” said Jess.

She went to the sideboard, forestalling both the men.

“Please don't do anything. If you're going to be billeted here we'd better begin as we mean to go on, hadn't we, and it'll be such a frightful bore for you if you once start waiting on me. You'll see, it'll be quite bad enough at cold Sunday supper to-night when we're supposed to wait on ourselves and everybody gets into a flat spin and no one can sit and eat in peace. In some ways, I think this house is frightfully like a madhouse.”