Late and Soon (19 page)

“Is he a friend of yours?” ventured Valentine.

“He thinks he is,” said Primrose, without emphasis. She pulled her skimpy silk garment round her.

“I suppose the bloody bath-water will be cold, as usual.”

She walked on.

She had been disagreeable, but not angry.

I'm glad, thought Valentine, without irony.

From the back-stairs at the end of the long passage in which she stood came the sound of high, childish voices as the Coombe evacuees, with cries of joyful excitement, hastened downstairs to their expedition with Jess.

For an instant Valentine was back in the past, some eighteen years ago, and heard the flying feet and the gay, excited voice of the child Primrose running to meet her on her return from some brief absence of an hour or two.

She saw, for that flash of time, the small, eager figure with yellow hair flying towards her, and all but held out her hand to steady the little form that must surely be about to fling itself against her, clasping her waist. The brief illusion fled. Primrose had long been grown-up, she hated and distrusted her mother now.

And I shall never know, thought Valentine as so often before, how it began — where it all went wrong. She went into the big, closed-up room that was called the Red Room, and began to take the dust-sheet off the bed.

Esther, singing shrilly, made her appearance, decorously hushing herself as she reached the open door.

Just before twelve o'clock Jess reappeared with the evacuees — hilarious and sticky with lemonade and cake — and dismissed them cheerfully to the society of Madeleine.

Val, sitting at her desk in the hall, nerved herself to carry out a resolution to which she had come in the course of the morning.

“Jess, will you look after uncle Reggie at lunch? I'm going to be out.”

“Where are you going?” Jess asked, friendly and inquisitive.

“To the Victoria Hotel. Colonel Lonergan asked me to have lunch there with him.”

“How perfectly wizard. I wish he'd ask me. Who else is going to be there?”

“He didn't say that anybody was.”

“Not Primrose?”

“No.”

Jess looked at her mother long and thoughtfully. Her young face was inexpressive of all but its smooth un-subtle innocence, yet Valentine knew that her mind was working, probably very clearly and dispassionately, on a new idea.

Jess was neither imaginative nor unduly sensitive, but
she was not at all lacking in perception, and she had confidence in her own judgments.

“Mummie, quite personally speaking, I think it's a perfectly sound idea, you going to the Victoria Hotel for lunch with the Colonel. But you do realize that Primrose will think it's a bit lousy?”

“I'm afraid she will. But you see, darling, I knew Colonel Lonergan years and years ago in Rome, and when he came here we picked up that relationship again where we'd left it off. He and I are friends.”

“I see.” Jess was still thoughtful though not, Valentine felt, antagonistic.

“Well,” she said at last, “it's okay by me, naturally, but do I have to tell Primrose?”

“No, darling. I only wanted you to understand.”

“Oh, there isn't anything to understand,” Jess declared, and Valentine felt that she was firmly, if kindly, repudiating any idea of a possible alliance between them. She might concede to her mother every right to an independent life, but she would never range herself beside her, least of all in opposition to a contemporary of her own.

“There isn't anything to understand,” she repeated. “Why shouldn't you go out to lunch with the Colonel if he asks you? Besides, it isn't any business of mine, is it? But it's a bit different for Primrose, because she knew him in London and all that. She's sure to be ratty, but after all there's nothing new in that.”

“Oh, Jess! I wish Primrose was happier. I wish we could do anything.”

“Honestly, mummie, aren't you being rather sentimental? I mean, here's this war going on all over the place, and Poles and Jews being tortured, and babies being bombed, and families all broken up — I can't feel it matters a scrap whether Primrose is happy or not. Or anybody else, for that matter.”

Valentine gazed at her, appalled.

“It's odds on we shan't have any kind of
happiness
in
the world, even after the war's over — if it ever is over — but probably happiness isn't as frightfully important as one thinks,” Jess said. “I mean, honestly and truly, mummie, what do individual people matter?”

“Perhaps you're right,” Valentine admitted sadly, “but I don't think one ever feels quite like that about one's children.”

“Gosh, how funny. I mean,” Jess explained carefully, “funny-peculiar. Shall you be back in time for the Red Cross meeting?”

“Yes, certainly.”

“That'll be fine,” Jess returned, rather absent-mindedly.

She never attended the Red Cross sewing-parties herself, even when they were held in the drawing-room at Coombe.

“Would you see if you can find a few chrysanthemums for aunt Venetia's room?”

“Okay. And for the boy friend too?” Jess enquired blithely, and Valentine understood that their conversation was over.

After Jess had gone, she sat on at her desk, not moving, thinking over what she had said: What
do
individual people matter?

Valentine had always thought that they did matter. She thought so still, and Jessica's point of view, so different, and so matter-of-factly expressed, saddened her deeply.

It surprised her, too, and made her understand afresh how little she knew about the real Jess. She almost felt now as though she knew more about Primrose than about Jess — but each, in their different ways, kept her at arm's length.

Her sense of having completely failed as a mother was more overwhelming than it had ever been, although it was so often with her.

Suddenly and instinctively she raised her eyes to the portrait of Humphrey. The painting, hard and shallow
as she thought it, gave her his blunt, rather arrogant features, his straight-gazing eyes that saw things so much more clearly than they had ever seen people, and for an instant — all her perceptions heightened and sharpened by her own new and vivid emotional experience — she realized to the full the utter unreality that their marriage had been.

“Val!” said her brother's voice, and he spoke irritably so that she started with a sense of guilt. “What's all this about Venetia coming here to-night?”

“She's got to be at Bristol this afternoon, and she's coming on here.”

“What for?”

“To see us, I suppose,” Valentine suggested, although she felt by no means certain that this was altogether true.

The General appeared to share her doubt.

“Doesn't sound like her. She'll give a hell of a lot of trouble, as usual, and she'll expect drink, and talk all through the News. And how's she going to like the Irishman?”

“He isn't coming back to dinner to-night — it'll probably be about ten o'clock when he gets back — so they won't see so very much of one another.”

Valentine, as usual, had spoken to placate. But in her own mind the General's question woke echoes so that she, also, wondered how Venetia would like the Irishman.

The Victoria Hotel was as resolutely Victorian a period-piece as the conservative West of England could produce. Plush
portières,
enormous sea-scapes painted in oil and framed in gilt moulding, rose-patterned wall-paper, fret
work screens and brackets bearing Toby jugs, were all there. The furniture was dark and heavy, and there was a great deal of it.

Valentine, who had walked in from Coombe, saw Lonergan's car standing in the yard beside the hotel entrance when she arrived. She enjoyed walking, and the lanes, even in January, showed colour and beauty, and as she walked into the darkness of the hall, knowing that her lover was waiting for her, happiness came back to her in a rush.

Lonergan was standing before the steel-barred grate in which was glowing a coal fire. He came to meet her.

“Thank God you've come. I've been nearly out of my mind.”

“Am l late?”

“Well, no. You're not. But every minute has seemed like an hour. I'd a wild hope you might be here when I arrived. Take off your little hat, darling — I want to see your pretty hair.”

She pulled off her soft woollen cap and smiled at him.

“Ah, you're lovely, Val.”

His voice, with its warm strength and tenderness, made her want to cry. Looking at her as though he knew and understood this, Lonergan pushed forward a deep chair, and then took one beside her.

“I've ordered sherry. It's coming now. I got through the morning's work quicker than I expected and I wanted to come and fetch you, but I thought perhaps you'd have started by some other way and we'd miss one another.”

“I did come by a short cut — it saves over a mile.”

“I'll be able to take you home, so that you'll be in time for your Red Cross meeting.”

“How did you remember about that?”

“The way I'd remember anything that concerns you, my darling.”

“Rory, you say all the things that no one has ever
said to me, and that I've always known I should love to hear.”

The elderly head waiter brought their sherry, and they drank, looking and smiling at one another.

There were other people in the hall, talking and smoking and drinking, and Valentine and Lonergan spoke together in low voices.

The ardour and the directness of his love-making gave her a sense of enchantment. She could scarcely believe that she was awake and not somehow, strangely, reverting to romantic fantasies of her girlhood.

She had meant to speak of Primrose, to tell him that Venetia Rockingham, her competent, hard, rather alarming sister-in-law, was arriving that evening, that she felt afraid of Venetia's rapid, shallow judgments and unsparing tongue — but all these things fled from her mind.

They talked only about themselves.

In the dining-room, after ordering lunch, Lonergan said to her:

“I'd a letter from Arlette this morning. I've brought it, to show you.”

Very simply, as though she had been his wife already, he handed to her across the table two thin sheets of ruled paper in a cheap blue envelope.

Valentine was unreasonably surprised to find the letter written in French, in a careful, sloping, characteristically French handwriting.

The Irish address at the head of the paper looked incongruous.

It was a lively, amusingly-written letter, showing originality and a certain precocity in the young writer. At the end of the letter she admitted candidly that she often felt lonely, and that her aunt Nellie was very kind to her but
“peu sympathique du côté intellectuel”.
She asked whether there was any hope of seeing her father again soon, and said that anything else, the war excepted, had for her
“peu d'importance”.

“She's terribly fond of you, Rory.”

“The poor child. I want to see her, too.”

“Of course,” said Valentine, the more gently because of the pain it caused her to realize anew the strength of the link that still bound him to Laurence and the long years that lay behind him — years in which she had no part.

“Could you get over there?”

“I doubt it. Unless we suddenly got some embarkation leave. I could manage it then.”

Afraid that her face might betray her pain, Valentine laid her hand across her mouth and kept her eyes steadily fixed on Lonergan as she uttered her assent.

“Darling, what is it?” he asked instantly. “If I did go, I'd want you with me — as my wife.”

She said nothing, knowing that her eyes answered him.

“Dearest, I was mad to think we could discuss marriage in a public place like this — but thank God I'm coming back to Coombe to-night. We'll talk then.”

She handed him back Arlette's letter.

“Thank you for letting me see it. Rory, couldn't we possibly get her over here? She could come to Coombe, if you'd like it.”

“Ah, you're sweet. But you don't understand. Arlette wouldn't know what to make of a house like Coombe. She's just a little Parisian
bourgeoise”

“But she's with your sister now.”

“Nellie's a nice old middle-class Irishwoman, darling. She doesn't belong to your world, any more than I do. It wouldn't matter to her, living out of her class — though I doubt if she'd enjoy it — because she's elderly, and simple, and without very much imagination. But it wouldn't do with a sensitive young girl like Arlette. You'd both be embarrassed.”

“Oh, Rory, no.”

“I don't mean that you'd ever be anything but an angel to her — tolerant, and understanding.”

“How could one be anything else, with a child — even
if she wasn't your child? And after all, I've lived abroad, I've met French people.”

“I know, darling.”

He paused for a moment.

“It's like this, Val. We'll have to face it sooner or later, just as we'll have to face everything that's going to affect our future together. We can't ignore the fact that your relations won't know what to make of me — or rather, they'll think they know only too well — and they certainly wouldn't know what to make of my child. I don't mean her illegitimacy.”

“I know you don't. I think you're exaggerating the importance of the old traditions now, Rory. Primrose and Jess, and all their generation, just ignore them.”

“I'm not so sure. But anyway, love, it's not Primrose and Jess that matter now. It's you. Shall you mind that my background has just been Irish middle-class and French
bourgeoisie,
with a few years of second-rate artistic Bloomsbury thrown in?”

“Why should I?”

“Darling, because it'll mean that your friends won't have any use for me whatever, and that mine will probably seem to you a strange, rather squalid collection, if you ever meet them.”