Late and Soon (11 page)

“Will you shut the door, darling?”

“I can't, mummie. Aunt Sophy'll want to come in at any minute. Aunt Sophy! Good little dog!”

Jess whistled and called, dashed from the table to the door and back again, and when no puppy appeared, shut the door briskly.

“I'm training her,” she said to Sedgewick.

The talk, from which Jessica had dispelled any possible constraint, circled round the dogs, the weather, Valentine's intention of going to church and Lonergan's assertion that it would be impossible for him to do so.

“Being Irish, are you a Catholic?” asked Jess.

“I am. Not a very good one, I'm afraid.”

“Fancy the Pope,” said Jess thoughtfully, and the eyes of Valentine and Rory Lonergan met in a swift look of shared amusement.

Aunt Sophy whined and scratched at the door, Sedgewick and Jess rose simultaneously and raced for it. Jess, slipping, caught hold of his arm to retrieve her balance, shrieked with laughter, and almost fell again, picking up her dog.

“I'm afraid you can see only too plainly why Jess thinks this house is like a madhouse,” Valentine said, gently ironical, to Lonergan.

“She's a riot,” he answered under his breath, and the mirthful exhilaration that lay beneath the odd little phrase communicated itself to her.

She felt gay and irresponsible, as she had not felt for years, when breakfast was over, the two officers gone and Jess had taken the puppy out into the garden.

The sensation remained with her all through the Sunday morning routine: Jess, bringing the car to the door and receiving without expostulation all assurances that if she didn't go and change at once she'd be late, General Levallois' appearance, in the weekly spruceness of a dark-blue suit, black tie and well-brushed hat, the triumphant return of Jess miraculously transfigured in Sunday clothes, and the familiar drive down the hill to the church.

Valentine liked going to church, but she was aware that her liking was based on sentimental and traditional feeling. It had nothing to do with faith, or even with religion.

The familiar and beautiful words of the Psalms always struck her afresh, the hymns, associated with childhood, gave her a faint nostalgic pleasure. She even found repose in listening to the sound, if not to the actual words, of the elderly clergyman's gentle ramblings from the pulpit.

He had been already for some years at St. Martin's when she first came to live at Coombe.

Prayer was not a form of self-expression natural to Valentine. On her knees, she thought of Primrose, Jess, her own dead parents and her dead husband, as she did always in church yet with a conviction that prayer in the true sense of the word must mean something more impersonal and deeper than anything within her comprehension.

The congregation, a very small one, went out and Valentine exchanged greetings with her neighbours. Most of them were from farm or cottage homes, and most of them she had known ever since her marriage.

They made comments on the war situation, the weather or local village news. One or two women who served with Valentine on the Women's Institute Committee came up and spoke with her about past or future activities.

Jess let the dogs out of the car, talked to people — especially those, mostly farmers' sons, whom she met in the hunting-field — and held General Levallois' two sticks for him while he clambered painfully into the seat behind the driver's.

“Mummie, I'm going to walk home by the short-cut with the dogs.”

“Very well.”

“Hadn't you better start? Uncle Reggie is definitely frozen.”

“Very well,” said Valentine again.

She went back to the car.

“The distributor!” shrieked Jess, starting off with the dogs.

Of course. Jess never seemed to forget anything practical. Valentine did so frequently.

She replaced the distributor and turned the car.

Her brother, who seldom as a rule spoke to her when she was driving, leant forward from the back seat.

“Val, did you find out whether this feller — the Irish one — was the chap you knew in Rome?”

“Yes, Reggie. He is.”

“Dam' cheek,” said the General.

She laughed.

“How could he possibly help it?”

“I grant you he couldn't help being sent down here — that's obvious. But I can see that he's the kind who if you give him an inch will take an ell.”

“I don't agree.”

“He managed to get himself billeted here on account of Primrose, I suppose. Jess let out that they'd been seeing one another in London. Look out, Val! You should never take a corner like that.”

“I'm sorry. If he's a friend of Primrose's, naturally she might easily have suggested his coming here.”

“There's no if about it. What's he doing, meeting her at Exeter and driving her out here with him, and what's
she
doing, if it comes to that, dashing down from London for a week all of a sudden just as he arrives?”

What indeed?

Valentine felt as though she had been abruptly confronted by a quite new aspect of Rory Lonergan and his possible concern in her life.

Because she was hurt and acutely, suddenly unhappy, she said at once:

“But Reggie, it's all perfectly all right. Primrose knows a great many men, and I think a lot of them admire her. Why shouldn't Colonel Lonergan? He's a good deal older than she is, but that's all.”

“He's probably got a wife and half a dozen brats in that damned disloyal country of his.”

“He's not married at all.”

“Good God, Val, the rate women go on. I suppose you've already made up your mind what kind of wedding-dress Primrose is to wear. Let me tell you that in these days people go every kind of length and marriage doesn't enter into it at all. Not that I mean,” the General conceded rather grudgingly, “that Primrose would go off the rails or anything like that. All I say is, you'll be a fool if you trust an Irishman. They're plausible, that's what they are. Plausible.”

He went on repeating words to much the same effect until they reached Coombe.

Valentine paid little heed.

She was telling herself that she was forty-four, and
Primrose twenty-four. That she knew nothing, in reality, of Primrose's life in London beyond assertions, general rather than particular, of her attraction for men — assertions that had travelled to Coombe for the most part by way of Venetia Rockingham. That Lonergan was a man susceptible to women, and himself likely to charm them.

Then, her thoughts coming round again in a circle, she let herself remember the previous evening and her own happiness of the morning.

She knew that she had not been mistaken as to the atmosphere of mutual understanding, and even tenderness, in which their long conversation had taken place.

But one might easily be mistaken as to its ultimate significance. Rory Lonergan could have been rendered happy, as she had been herself, by the warmth of the sympathy between them and that faint, romantic, shared memory of the Pincio Gardens, and it might all have meant no more to him than that.

Valentine had never believed herself to be capable of inspiring passion, but she believed Primrose to be so. And Primrose was young, and men had thought her beautiful before — her arrogant self-assurance, so obviously based upon experiences of a rock-like reality, had long ago convinced her mother of that. She could not have said when nor even why she had first felt certain that Primrose was no longer inexperienced in the ways of passionate love — but the certainty was there.

Valentine drew up the car in front of the portico. She left it there for Jess to put away.

The General slowly climbed out backwards. In the hall, he rang the bell. If the weather made it in any way possible he always walked up and down the terrace, round the garden and into the walled kitchen garden every Sunday morning on his return from church, leaning on Madeleine's arm.

The bell was his summons to Madeleine.

Madeleine never grumbled or protested whatever the demands made upon her.

She loved them all, and she had lived with the Levallois family in the old days.

She must have grown used to it all, Valentine felt, even to her curious, recluse existence at Coombe where she would have nothing to do with the other servants, always declaring herself unable to understand a word of English, and carrying her own meals up to her sitting-room, to be eaten in solitude.

She came into the hall now, muffled as though for an Arctic expedition in black-and-white check coat, ancient feather boa, shiny kid gloves, pointed black boots in goloshes and black felt hat with the brim pulled down over her eyes.

The clumps of her thickly-henna'd hair were visible under the hat. For some reason that Valentine had never analysed, the artificial colour was not out of keeping with the shrewd kindliness of Madeleine's pale, round face and of her large brown eyes, brilliant as diamonds.

“Bonjour, Madeleine.”

“Bonjour, madame.”

Valentine and the General, Jess and Primrose, always talked with Madeleine in her own language.

She spoke eagerly now of
messieurs les officiers
and said that she had met Colonel Lonergan on the stairs and that he had spoken to her in French that she characterized as perfect.

She had also seen the young Captain, and thought him
très gentil,
although he had said nothing. He probably knew no French and was less
homme du monde
than his superior officer, said Madeleine, but she was glad of his presence, which would amuse Mademoiselle Jess.

“So long as she's here, but she may be called up any day.”

“Alas, madame!”

The General enquired whether Primrose was downstairs yet, and Madeleine, with a subtle change of tone to which Valentine was well accustomed, replied that she was not.

“Well, we don't wait luncheon for anyone,” declared the General. “Come on, now, Madeleine — the best of the day'll be over.”

Madeleine took one of his sticks — a privilege accorded to nobody else — and substituted her own sturdy arm.

They disappeared slowly through the garden door.

Valentine, moving scarcely less slowly, went over to the fire which the maids had as usual neglected to make up, so that it had sunk to red embers on a small bed of wood-ash.

She put on more logs and, kneeling down, began to blow upon the sparks with the bellows.

Her mind was dwelling once again on Lonergan's story of his life in France with Laurence, and on what he had said about Arlette.

“… I wasn't interested in her at all till the last year. And now I am.… When all this is over, if I'm still living, I'll have Arlette with me.”

All the things that had conditioned his life were things of which she knew practically nothing — his work as an artist, his relationship to Laurence, his belated affection and sense of responsibility towards their child, even his Army career — at best, if he chose to talk to her of them she could enter into his descriptions sympathetically but that was all.

Other people, of whose very names she was ignorant, had shared his experiences with him and had helped to build up the background of past associations that made up so large a part of every life.

She turned her mind for a moment towards the future but, in the midst of war, there could be no escape there. To live from day to day was the only possibility, so far as personal problems were concerned. She reminded her
self, without much sense of reality, that Rory Lonergan was as likely as any other man in the Forces to lose his life before the end of the war.

At length her thoughts stopped, where she had known they must, at the immediate present.

Was she to watch a love-affair develop between Primrose and Lonergan?

After all, Valentine told herself, it couldn't prove to be an unendurable situation. Her own romantic illusion had been based on a single evening and could have thrown out no indestructible roots.

Primrose was her child and she had always wanted, and still wanted, happiness for her. She had even believed that happiness might make Primrose normal and simple and kind, and it had seemed to her that no price could be too high to pay for that.

I never thought it might come like this though, Valentine reflected, and a dark shadow of misery and uncertainty seemed to settle down upon her spirit.

She started violently at the sudden noise made by Jess returned from her walk.

“Mummie, this is frightfully important. I want to ask you something.”

“What, my precious?”

Jess, at least, never resented or sneered at terms of endearment even if she never made use of them herself.

“Well, look, we've got all these officers coming for tea and they'll be staying on for supper, and I don't suppose I'll be at home after about another week or something, for the rest of the duration, so couldn't we possibly, just for once, make a party of it and scrape up some drink for them? Isn't there anything at all in the cellar?”

“I think there must be,” said Valentine, touched. “Anyhow, there's a bottle of sherry left in the wine cooler, and we'll open that, Jess, and have it in before supper.”

“Gosh, that'll be Heaven. And I could not take any, if that'd make it go round better. Actually, I loathe the taste of it unless I mix it with water.”

“I don't think you'd better let uncle Reggie see you mixing it with water.”

“Would he go bats or something? It'd be rather fun to try, in a way. Thanks terrifically, mummie.”

“Just tell me how many there'll be.”

“Buster and a friend who I don't know the name of, and Captain Sedgewick — he definitely wants to be called Charles, by the way — and I suppose Colonel Lonergan if he's not too grand?”

“I'm sure he's not. Jess — do you like him?”

“Oh, I think he's divine. He's just Irish enough, isn't he? I mean, I'd have had a definite pain if he'd been after saying Begorrah all day long, like Irish people on the films.”