Late and Soon (12 page)

Valentine laughed.

“I don't believe anybody ever says it at all, off the films.”

“Oh, the films wouldn't have it unless
somebody
did. They're frightfully realistic and careful about things like that,” Jess asserted. “Prob'ly it's said like anything in some part of Ireland that Colonel Lonergan doesn't come from. I'm glad he'll be here this evening. It'll suit Primrose fine.”

“I suppose it will.”

“Well, she's sure to despise all the others, isn't she? I think Primrose is too terribly like a camel, when she pulls down the corner of her mouth. I wish I could do it. I've often tried, but I never can.”

“My dear, do you really want to look like a camel?”

“Well, mummie, you can't say it doesn't get one somewhere. Look at Primrose! People ringing her up all the evening, and now a Colonel falling for her!”

Valentine gazed at Jess in silence.

“Mummie, you look awfully as if you thought I was the Brains Trust or something. Is there anything wrong with me?”

“No darling. Nothing at all.”

Captain Charles Sedgewick, returning from Headquarters four miles away in the market town late that afternoon, deduced from the battered motor-cycle standing before the door of Coombe that Banks and his friend had arrived.

He went round the house and in at the garden door — that was, he had discovered, always left open — and up to his room without entering the hall.

He could hear the little girl, Jess, laughing.

He was a young man who tabulated his impressions of people carefully and he had summed Jess up as a nice kid, unaffected and a good sort, not likely to set the Thames on fire unless she made an unexpectedly brilliant marriage. She might do so, at that, thought Charles Sedgewick, slamming down the heavy window-sash in his unwarmed bedroom.

Where Jess fell in love, she would almost certainly marry, and where she fell in love would depend entirely on where she happened to be. He knew already that she was niece to Lady Rockingham, and “People of that sort,” he said to himself, “are a regular trades union. Wherever she's stationed with the WAAF, she'll get invitations to her own kind of house. I only hope, poor kid, they won't be as damned uncomfortable as this one is.”

There was no rancour in the thought.

Charles Sedgewick despised dependence on creature comforts. He never smoked, seldom drank, and had won a mention in despatches on the beach at Dunkirk.

His widowed mother's suburban house had exactly the kind of cosiness that he most disliked and to which, before the war, he had so much preferred a dingy bedroom in the Strand from which he could daily walk to the Bank where he worked. His sentimental mother's plea that Charlie was all she had in the world and that they ought to make a home for one another until he should marry some nice girl, had not moved him the least.

He was kind and often affectionate to her, wrote to her frequently, had himself photographed in uniform to please her, and spent most of his leaves at
Dunroamin,
coldly civil to her circle of Bridge-playing, grievance-mongering and domestically-minded ladies of middle age.

As for the nice girl that his mother thought she wanted him to marry, Sedgewick had no intention whatever of getting married, least of all to the type of girl his mother called “nice”.

It would be difficult enough to live at all after the war, should he survive it, without being saddled with a wife.

With quiet regularity, when on leave he visited the more expensive of the London brothels.

Capable, energetic and with a cast-iron self-confidence, Sedgewick applied himself to his soldiering and made the most of every opportunity that came in his way.

He was pleased to be at Coombe, in the same billet as his Colonel and with a family that he had at once classified as “the real thing”.

As he pulled off his boots, washed his hands and sleeked his smooth, straight red hair close to his narrow head, he wondered what the elder daughter was like.

He had guessed, from references made by Jess, that she was not of the unsophisticated “county” type. She
was three- or four-and-twenty, and had been living an independent existence in London.

On Lady Arbell he wasted no thoughts at all. She was as completely unreal to him as he probably was to her.

They would merely exchange the polite spoken symbols of civilization current between two people belonging to different generations and, indeed, different worlds.

He went downstairs and found the two subalterns — Banks and a stocky North Country youth called Jack Olliver — playing spillikins at a round table in the hall with Jess, her mother and Colonel Lonergan.

Lady Arbell looked up at him and smiled, enquiring whether he had had any tea.

Jess and the subalterns, evidently on the friendliest terms already, were loudly disputing over the heaped-up slivers of white bone.

“I had a cup of tea in the town, thank you.”

Sedgewick's extremely observant eye had already discerned that the other daughter, Primrose, was downstairs too. She was sitting in an armchair with her back to the players, and Sedgewick could only see the top of a pale blonde head and two long and well-shaped legs with sandalled feet resting on the hearth.

“Primrose, I don't think you've met Captain Sedgewick,” said her mother.

The blonde head turned and Primrose, scarcely moving, looked round the chair-back.

Her mouth twisted to one side and she made a sound that scarcely amounted to a spoken word.

Sedgewick thought: “She's like someone on the stage, playing a Society girl.”

He moved over and sat down opposite to her.

“Come in on the next game, Charles,” amiably shouted Jessica.

“Okay. Thanks, I will.”

“You don't have to,” remarked Primrose — and this time he could hear what she said.

“I like spillikins. Don't you?”

“Not particularly. Why should one?”

“To test the steadiness of one's hand, perhaps,” Sedgewick suggested.

He was not interested in what she might be saying, even as an indication of her personality. He was thinking of her looks, of her figure and her long legs and flat, narrow hips, and of her air of arrogant discontent.

She wasn't at all like Jess or her mother. Her bad manners, he decided, were just a pose, probably intended to show how different she was.

They neither pleased nor displeased him. So long as a girl had poise, and was well-turned-out and confident of her own power to attract men, Charles Sedgewick was perfectly ready to be attracted. He had hoped, from the beginning, that one or other of the girls at Coombe might interest him.

Cries and exclamations came from the players at the round table.

“Buster! The whole pile
rocked
! I saw it.”

“Come on, then. See what you can do.”

“Steady.… That little hooked one is your best chance.… The Colonel's left it all ready for you.… Look out — don't move——”

“You
blew
on it, you cad!”

“I swear I didn't.”

Primrose said:

“How do you like being stationed down here?”

“It's okay. Devon's new to me.”

“What's your own part of the world?”

“London.”

“Me too.”

“Now then, sir — you've a clear run.”

“I have not, then. I'll need a hand like a rock.”

“That one moved!”

“Two of them moved.”

“Most of them did. Lady Arbell, I've done all the spade-work for you now.”

“You drive a van or something, don't you?” Sedge-wick asked Primrose.

“That's right. What I don't know about London Bridge in the blitz is nobody's business.”

“One or two noisy moments, no doubt.”

“I'll say so. Have you been mixed up in any of the bomb racket?”

“Not I. This is a civilians' war,” Sedgewick answered carelessly.

He had no intention of telling her that he had been at the Dunkirk evacuation. For one thing he disliked talking about it, and for another he was perfectly well aware that she would neither be, nor pretend to be, in the least interested.

“Go for that one at the corner and you ought to get the lot.”

“Keep your head, now, Jess.”

“You're putting me off …!”

There was a shriek from Jess, and laughter and scuffling from the subalterns.

“I
swear
I've won!” Jess cried earnestly. “Haven't I, Colonel Lonergan? Don't listen to Buster and Jack, they're not speaking the truth.”

“The Children's Hour,” said Primrose.

“Come on, Charles,” Jess cried. “Or shall we try something else? I'll tell you what — let's play Racing Demon!”

Banks and Olliver were loud in their acclamations at this suggestion.

“This table won't be large enough, though. Shall we go into the dining-room?”

“No,” said Lady Arbell, “it's too cold, and besides, I think Ivy laid the table before she went out. Four of you can play at this table all right.”

She got up and moved towards the fire.

“Take my place, Captain Sedgewick. If you like Racing Demon?”

“It's my favourite sport.”

“Play instead of me, Lady Arbell,” urged Jack Olliver.

Jess interposed.

“It's all right. Mummie really isn't a Racing Demon fan. She almost always loses, because she has a complex about manners.”

“You can't afford manners for Racing Demon,” agreed Colonel Lonergan. He smiled at his hostess.

Jess went to a cupboard, pulled out a drawer and produced several battered packs of cards.

Sedgewick looked at Primrose.

“Playing?” he asked.

She shook her head.

He went over to the table, and Lonergan at the same moment got up from his chair.

Sedgewick sketched a polite protest.

“All right, Charles. You carry on.”

The Colonel, like Lady Arbell, had moved over to the fire.

He was standing, looking down at his hostess.

Jess and the subalterns were flicking over the cards, counting the number in each dog's-eared and discoloured pack, and explaining to one another the rules by which the game should be played.

Charles Sedgewick, lightly stroking his small red moustache, looked from Jess to her sister, from Primrose to the man and woman over the fire, — so much older — of whom one was his superior officer and the other a slender, faded creature with greying hair, into whose house the fortune of war had taken him.

He heard her say to the Colonel:

“Do go and write in peace in the breakfast-room, the noise in here will be ear-splitting in another minute.”

“I've been writing most of the day. I was wondering if you'd care to come and listen to the Six O'Clock News. I've a grand fire in there.”

Lady Arbell looked across at her daughter.

“I've one or two things to see to before supper. I think I'll wait for the news till nine. I daresay Primrose would find it warmer in there. Your batman makes a much better fire than my house-parlour-maid does.”

Primrose remained without stirring.

Lonergan, after waiting a moment, went by himself into his new office.

“Ready?” cried Jess. “Does everybody understand everything? Charles, you'd better keep the score, and mind you don't cheat.”

She thrust paper and pencil at him.

Primrose slouched out of the hall, up the stairs.

These people knew how to make one feel perfectly at home and natural. Sedgewick would hand them that, he told himself, grinning at the thought of the two delighted boys who had raced one another to the bathroom and whose loud, cheerful voices he had heard a moment ago on their way down to supper.

He thought of the painfully polite hospitality to which he was best accustomed — the obvious preparations, the apologies that deceived nobody, and — usually — the laboured nature of the conversation, taking the form of question and answer.

Charles Sedgewick was quite certain that houses like Coombe had long ago had their day — not many of them were left, he imagined, and a good thing too.

The privileged classes, amongst whom he unhesitatingly placed Lady Arbell and her family, were in the last ditch. Some of them would go down fighting, of course — but they were doomed, one and all.

Girls like Primrose and Jessica would either have to earn a living or, if they married, would have to work
hard in their own homes instead of paying other people to do it all for them.

He hummed to himself “
I don't want to set the world on fire
” and went downstairs.

A decanter and glasses stood on a small table; the old gentleman — General Levallois — had come to life again and was sitting by the fire, wearing a curious old velveteen coat, and Lady Arbell and Jess were talking with Cyril Banks and Jack Olliver.

They were drinking sherry, and Sedgewick noticed with amusement the controlled expression of disgust with which Jess was sipping at hers.

“Have some sherry?” said the General.

Sedgewick thanked him and refused.

He joined the group.

A clock struck eight.

“Why isn't dinner ready?” instantly enquired the General.

“It's Sunday, Reggie, and Ivy's out. Supper is cold, and it's quite ready. We're just waiting till we're all here.”

“You're not going to wait for Primrose surely.”

“Colonel Lonergan isn't here either,” Jess pointed out. “We must wait for a Colonel.”

“He won't mind if we don't,” said Lady Arbell, smiling.

“Here is the Colonel,” said Jack Olliver.

“I beg your pardon if I'm late. You shouldn't have waited.”

“Primrose is later. Not that we ever wait for her,” remarked Jess. “Take aunt Sophy, Buster! She gets under one's feet so.”

The ungainly puppy changed hands.