The Sweet Dove Died (14 page)

It was not until the evening that the pain and sickness left her and she sat up tentatively to find that her head no longer ached and that she was able to drink a cup of weak tea. In her relief at being well again, other things seemed better too. Dickie had promised to drive her back to London the next day; she almost looked forward to taking up the threads of her life again.

XXII

Christmas was now almost upon them. It had come round again in its inexorable way, with its attendant embarrassments which this year seemed even more numerous than usual. Ned was going to have to spend it in Oxford with his friends, who were rather hurt by his neglect of them. The evening before he went James took him out to dinner in Chelsea to give him his Christmas present, a pair of expensive cuff links. This had been comparatively easy to choose, for all Ned asked of a present was that it should have cost the giver a lot of money. Leonora’s had been much more difficult. The Sunday paper colour supplements offered no advice on what to give an older woman towards whom one was conscious of having behaved badly. Anything like the Victorian ‘love tokens’ of the past seemed inappropriate, so James eventually chose a picture book of reproductions of Victorian paintings. He knew that Leonora would be disappointed; even if she did not show it in her face, her tone of voice when she thanked him would betray it, as Miss Caton’s had when he opened the book of poetry Phoebe had sent him for his birthday. Books as presents were somehow lacking in excitement and romance. He was relieved when he learned that Humphrey was giving her a pair of amethyst earrings and hoped that his uncle’s present would in some way make up for his inadequacy, though he really knew it would not. James himself was going to winter sports as usual with what Humphrey called ‘a party of young people’, making it seem something very remote from himself and Leonora.

‘What are you doing on Christmas Day?’ he asked. ‘We could spend it together if you like.’

‘Thank you, Humphrey dear – but I always feel rather guilty about poor Liz on these occasions. It’s a kind of
duty
to give her a Christmas dinner. There she is all the time, with only those cats and unhappy memories of that cad of a husband for company, one does rather feel …’

Humphrey had always thought Liz seemed perfectly contented in her own way, but he was relieved that he need not entertain Leonora; he liked to spend the day quietly at his club, sleeping and playing bridge.

On Christmas evening Leonora was invited to’supper with Meg. There was cold chicken, and Colin, temporarily unattached and on his best behaviour, had made a special salad just like those he served at the snack bar.

‘So different from
last
year,’ Meg whispered to Leonora when Colin was out of the room. ‘That dreadful time … I thought he’d never come back, but he did.’

Leonora could have agreed that this Christmas was different for her too, but she had no wish to discuss her situation with Meg. Soon they would be entering into another year, during the course of which Ned would go back to America.

January was bleak and cheerless and the waiting turned out to be less easy than Leonora had expected. Every day that passed brought the time of Ned’s departure nearer, but at the same time it seemed to widen the gulf between herself and James. As the month went on it became obvious that James had ‘dropped’ her completely. Humphrey hardly mentioned him now; it was as if he were dead or had never existed. The days seemed long and hopeless and Leonora began to wish she had not given up working, for a routine job would at least have filled the greater part of the day. Yet she lacked the energy and initiative to find herself an occupation; she remembered the dreadful woman – 'Ba’, was it? – she had met at the Murrays’ party and the impertinent suggestions she had made about the useful voluntary work one could do. But when Leonora came to consider them each had something wrong with it: how could she do church work when she never went near a church, or work for old people when she found them boring and physically repellent, or with handicapped children when the very thought of them was too upsetting?

Humphrey, sensing that she was in a low state, suggested that she should find another tenant for the flat; obviously James would never come back and it would be less lonely for her to have somebody in the house. It might even be the means of providing her with a new interest. He envisaged a nice woman of about her own age, or a girl student, or even a young couple, but Leonora didn’t feel she could endure any of these.

Another woman might encroach on her independence and one never knew what a ‘student’ would get up to. As for a young couple, they would probably have a baby and she certainly wasn’t going to put up with
that.

Eventually Leonora forgot about the emptiness of the flat and stopped going up there as she sometimes used to just after James had gone. She had always cared as much for inanimate objects as for people and now spent hours looking after her possessions, washing the china and cleaning the silver obsessively and rearranging them in her rooms. The shock of finding that James had taken the fruitwood mirror had upset her quite disproportionately and Humphrey had searched everywhere to find another for her. Sensitive women were really very irritating at times, he had thought; it wasn’t even as if the mirror had been a particularly valuable piece. In the end he had managed to get one tolerably like James’s, of a pretty design but badly neglected. Leonora had taken a great deal of trouble polishing it and restoring its beauty with loving care. Yet when she looked into it the reflection it gave back was different from James’s mirror in which she had appeared ageless and fascinating. Now her reflection displeased her, for her face seemed shrunken and almost old. Or was she really beginning to look like that?

Her love of beautiful objects led her again to make solitary excursions to the sale rooms. She pored over flower books in Sotheby’s book room but could not bring herself to bid for anything; she could never hope to be as lucky as that first and only time. Then she would go down to Christie’s to see what was on view there. She kept all this secret from Humphrey, choosing times when it was unlikely that she would meet him, for at the back of her mind was the hope that she might run into James unexpectedly. But she never did.

One particularly cold morning at that time of year when it seems that winter will last for ever, she was examining some jewellery at Christie’s – fine stones in settings of the Edwardian era and the twenties, the kind of things she and James had so often laughed over, imagining their owners wearing them on unbelievably splendid occasions – when the full realisation of her unhappiness came to her. Her throat ached and tears came into her eyes, not only for herself but also for the owners of the jewellery, ageing now or old, some probably dead. It was all she could do to walk composedly out of the room, down the wide staircase and into the street. She felt lost, uncertain what to do or where to go, and began walking aimlessly. She must have collided with somebody unknowingly, for she was conscious of a woman apologising in a well-bred voice that had a note of surprise in it, as if Leonora were behaving in a peculiar way. One must at all costs avoid making an exhibition of oneself, she thought, pulling herself together and walking on until she found herself outside a cafe.

It was not until she had been sitting at a table for some minutes that she realised it was a self-service place and also that she had been there with James. Of course he had always fetched the coffee but now she had to go up to the counter and get it herself. This was not at all the kind of thing Leonora liked, though she had not minded going to Colin’s snack bar with Meg occasionally, and when she had got her cup and returned to the table she noticed other things to upset her.

The elderly woman clearing away the used crockery seemed even older and more fragile than when she had been here with James. He used to call her ‘the Polish Countess’, Leonora remembered; she had worn, aristocratic features and muttered to herself disturbingly in a foreign accent. In Leonora’s mind there seemed to be a connection between the old woman and the jewellery she had just seen. To make things worse, she now crashed down a heavy tray on Leonora’s table on which were piled not only dirty cups, saucers and plates but all kinds of food scraps – sandwich crusts, bits of lettuce and tomato, the remains of cream cakes and even squashed-out cigarette ends – it was really too disgusting.

‘Please take that tray away from here,’ said Leonora, in an icy voice.

‘I must put it somewhere, Madame,’ the old woman grumbled.

There was a hostile silence during which Leonora was conscious that she herself belonged here too, with the sad jewellery and the old woman and the air of things that had seen better days. Even the cast-off crusts, the ruined cream cakes and the cigarette ends had their significance. The woman, still muttering, removed the tray and dumped it on another table where a man preparing to tackle a doughnut with a knife and fork – presumably the implements provided – caused Leonora to shudder. She turned her head away and huddled into her fur coat, feeling herself debased, diminished, crushed and trodden into the ground, indeed ‘brought to a certain point of dilapidation’. I am utterly alone, she thought.

Fortunately the state of being ‘utterly’ alone is a rare one. Leonora saw it as applying to herself because James had left her. She would not have counted the friends she still had, like Humphrey and the elderly admirers who took her out to expensive meals, nor yet her women friends and acquaintances. One would almost rather not have had
them
at all. She was therefore dismayed as well as surprised when a woman carrying a cup of coffee sat down at the table and exclaimed, ‘Why, it’s Leonora!’

Leonora could hardly pretend not to recognise her cousin Daphne, though they seldom met. Quite a smart tweed coat and fur hat, but the sheepskin boots looked clumsy and countrified, was Leonora’s automatic reaction.

‘How nice to run into you like this,’ Daphne went on. ‘I’m just up for the day to see the exhibition at the Academy.’

How conscientiously cultured she was, coming up to town for such a purpose, thought Leonora, with something of her usual scorn. All the same, Daphne was a kind woman and perhaps as one grew older there was something to be said for kindness. Leonora found herself not unwilling to accept her invitation to lunch with her at her club.

It was a little unnerving to see quite so many women gathered together in one place. Daphne made no apology – as indeed how could she? – for the absence of men, and there were one or two scattered about in the dining-room, looking remarkably at ease in their surroundings.

‘Segregation seems old-fashioned now,’ said Daphne in answer to a comment from Leonora, ‘and yet one does rather like to have the place to oneself.’

As the meal went on Leonora felt an absurd desire to confide in Daphne. The wine might have loosened her restraint but she was careful to drink sparingly, recognising the warmth she was beginning to feel towards her cousin as a danger signal.

‘Have you had flu this winter?’ asked Daphne brightly. ‘There’s been a lot of it about.’

‘Yes, I haven’t been too well,’ said Leonora evasively.

‘Perhaps you need something to buck you up,’ said Daphne. ‘Sanatogen Tonic Wine, I saw an advertisement for it in the underground when I was waiting for a train. It has added iron, you know.’

Leonora glanced at her in surprise, but there was no vestige of mockery in her tone.

‘Or Wincarnis,’ she went on, ‘like one’s mother used to take.’

Daphne’s mother – Aunt Hilda – certainly not Leonora’s mother with the young Italian lover one had been thought too much of a child to know about.

There was a little left in the half bottle of Chablis they had drunk with their chicken. Daphne poured it into Leonora’s glass. It looked very pale and weak compared with the imagined richness of the tonic wine.

The waitress brought the menu for them to choose a sweet. As was to be expected Leonora shook her head, almost with distaste. Daphne, who had perhaps hoped for the jam roll they did so well at the club, regretfully also shook her head and murmured, ‘We’ll just have coffee, thank you.’

‘You live alone, don’t you?’ said Daphne, settling herself down in one of the leather armchairs for an afternoon’s cosy chat, Leonora felt. She nodded an answer.

‘You don’t find it lonely sometimes?’

‘No, I never have.’

‘Of course you have a lot of friends abroad, haven’t you, living there so much. I wonder you don’t try to escape the English winter.’

Leonora saw herself’abroad’, sitting at a marble table with a cool drink, watching people through her dark glasses. Or opening the shutters after a siesta and standing on a balcony looking at a distant view of roofs with perhaps a glimpse of the sea in between. Or visiting family friends, old now, who would remember her parents and herself as a girl. She was better off in her own house, rearranging her ornaments and waiting for James.

‘I find life in London more amusing,’ she said.

‘Oh, well …’ Conversation was obviously beginning to flag. Leonora thanked Daphne for the lunch and even echoed her hope that they might ‘do it again sometime’. They parted in the street with no certainty that they would ever meet again.

Leonora, moving away in the direction of Fortnum and Mason, found herself entering that emporium. She wanted to feel soft carpets under her feet and to move among jars of foie gras and bottles of peaches in brandy. A women’s club – though it had been kind of Daphne to ask her there – how could people bear such places? One really felt most unlike oneself in surroundings like that.

‘Taxi, madam?’ The doorman, solicitous as such people always were to Leonora, was holding an umbrella over her, for a few flakes of snow were beginning to fall.

‘Thank you,
yes.’
Leonora smiled up at him.

The snow was falling quite thickly now and when she got home the little patio was almost covered. Leonora stepped out to look at it and as she did so, one of Liz’s cats came up to her crying and rubbing itself against her legs. How had it got over from next door? she wondered. She tried to send it back over the wall but the animal would not go and continued to weave around her uttering its mournful cries. What did it want? She felt she ought to say something to it, but she could never distinguish Liz’s cats by name, and ‘Pussy’ seemed altogether too feeble and inadequate a form of address. As she puzzled, Liz came to the wall in her usual fussing way, ‘Oh,
there
he is,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t think
what
had happened to him.’