To the North (3 page)

“—Will you stay to tea?” put in Emmeline.

“No, I must be going on to the nursing-home. I am glad to have had this talk alone with you, Emmeline, we so seldom meet. You do understand what I mean? It has been so much in my mind.”

“Absolutely,” said Emmeline.

“You are clear-sighted,” said Lady Waters, patting Emmeline’s knee.

“You really can’t stay to tea?”

“No, thank you; I simply looked in to see if you were expecting Cecilia, and cheer you up just a little in case she had changed her plans. I rang you up twice this morning but there was no answer: perhaps you had better speak to the maids? Cecilia so hates to have messages overlooked. But I am glad to have had a word with you: one cannot say much on the telephone. You will think over our little talk?”

“Oh, yes, Georgina… . Yes.”

“And I brought a few tulips, to give Cecilia a welcome.”

“How very kind,” said Emmeline, looking round for the tulips.

“However (thinking she might have put off) I left them outside in the car, and as you have made the room so pretty already and your vases seem to be full, I think perhaps I will take them on to the nursing-home.”

“I expect that would be best.”

Lady Waters wrapped her silver fox round her chin and pulled on her black suede gloves. “And how
are
you?” she said looking closely at Emmeline. “There has hardly been time to hear. You are looking a little tired; the spring, I expect. Such a beautiful day, so still. You must come round next week and tell me all your news. Robert was asking for you only yesterday. And how is your little kitten Beelzebub?”

“Benito? He’s quite well, thank you.”

“A torn kitten?”

“More or less.”

“I expect that is best— And mind, tell Cecilia I shall expect her to-morrow; in fact she might ring up tonight: I shall be at home. I must hear all about Italy.”

“I’ll remind her.”

“Now I must really go; they don’t send up tea at this nursing-home after five o’clock,
They
met at my house, you know, Felicia and Ronald, and now there’s this tiny boy. It does seem extraordinary.”

“Doesn’t it.”

Emmeline went out with her cousin as far as the steps. “
There’s
a taxi, now,” Lady Waters said, looking down the road. “But it seems to be standing still.” She kissed Emmeline, the chauffeur shut the door; with a last significant look and a wave she was gone. As the Daimler turned off into Abbey Road someone tapped the glass of the taxi, which creaked into motion and drew up again at the gate where Emmeline stood. “Thank heavens,” Cecilia said, getting out, “the Daimler is unmistakable.”

“How long have you been sitting there?”

“It cost one and three extra: I thought she would never go. I watched that new chauffeur of hers smoke three cigarettes; I suppose he thinks in St. John’s Wood it doesn’t matter— Oh, how
are
you, how are you, angel …”

At the first sight of Emmeline a delicious sense of homecoming had rushed to Cecilia’s heart. They went up the steps arm-in-arm; the parlourmaid came out smiling; a thrush sang; the taxi-man carried the suitcases up the steps. Cecilia kissed Emmeline.

“What did Georgina want?”

“I don’t know— Tell me about the journey.”

“It was not bad. Though as I found that I was overdrawn at the bank I didn’t take a sleeper.”

“Cecilia, you are tiresome with your bank!”

“I have six hundred lire; I’ll change that back into English and not cash a cheque till May. Don’t be cross with me— Darling, how funny those tulips look!”

“They fell out again,” explained Emmeline.

“And I met a man in the train.”

“Someone you know?”

“Well, I know him now. We weren’t really meaning to talk, but I looked at his tie— No, he wasn’t nice really, though he made me laugh; he was self-satisfied and looked rather sensual.”

“How?” said Emmeline.

“Oh you know how people look—or you ought, but you never notice. Still, I daresay he was unhappy. You are so
ignorant
, darling. Still, it is nice to be home with you …”

Cecilia, strung-up, excited, not knowing where to begin, like a child at Christmas, pulled off her scarf and turned to look out of the window. On the iron steps to the garden sparrows were chittering, the unmoving boughs of the plane were in pale bud; next door a cherry-tree was in bloom. There was a brightness over the air but no sun.

“It’s always the same kind of day when I come home! Oh, those thrushes, Emmeline: I shall weep!”

“Why?”

“The birds in Italy-“

“You haven’t asked after Benito,” Emmeline said reproachfully.

Benito was brought in, but looked rather stodgily at Cecilia, sat down almost at once and began to wash: he was really Emmeline’s kitten. “He’s too sweet, but take him away,” said Cecilia, bored. “He’ll frighten the thrushes— I do hope Georgina didn’t annoy you? I can’t help feeling I brought her back into the family.”

“She brought you some tulips.”

“Oh, where?”

“But she took them on to the nursing-home.”

“Which nursing-home? Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Poor darling: you wished she’d been dead for a hundred years?”

“Yes,” said Emmeline gently.

Cecilia picked up their own tulips and put them in place with a touch. She said: “Half way through the St. Gothard, when I thought I was going to die, I thought what a nice house we lived in. I felt much worse, though, at Chiasso— Oh that man’s name in the train was Markie.”

“Did he say so?”

“No, he said his name was Linkwater. But I saw ‘Markie’ in handwriting across the corner of his cigarette case—he was that kind of young man.”

“Shall you see him again?”

“I might or might not. He’s a barrister.
You
wouldn’t like him.”

“Poor Markie …” said Emmeline, balancing with an elbow against the mantelpiece. Cecilia thought what a lovely thing Emmeline was; how she brightened the drawing-room with her satirical gentleness, her uneffusive glow. “I meant,” cried Cecilia, penitent, “to bring home so much from Italy, to be nicer myself, I mean,—and here I go, simply gossiping about men.”

“Still,” said Emmeline, “it
is
nice, having you back.”

Cecilia, her senses still running ahead from the speed of the journey, looked round. The drawing-room, still clearly seen as though strange, but already misting across with her sense of her life here, was exceedingly dear to her: two or three things, she noticed, were in the wrong place. In these first few glances she seemed to visit herself. Life here, still not quite her own, kept for these few more moments unknown tranquillity. She had forgotten the heavy smoothness with which armchairs ran over the parquet, the sudden muting of steps as one crossed a rug. The mirrors were bright with reflections of grey-green gardens; in one was a cherry-bough. Firelight fingered the cups on the tray between the armchairs; arched deep recesses were dark with books, the walls all daylight: the long pale-green curtains hung from their pelmets like pillars, placidly fluted.

The white marble mantelpiece, graced and a little hidden by Emmeline’s leaning figure, was of its period, rather ornate and high. But here Cecilia’s eyes paraded a whole array of dear objects, sentimental and brittle. If elsewhere the room in its studied restraint might seem cold or formal—high windows down to the parquet, white cushions, cabinets spaced out round the glossy walls—the mantelpiece broke out into a gala of femininity. Clear as a still-life in the limpid afternoon light, the ornaments smiled at each other and might be supposed after midnight to dance and tinkle: candlesticks dropping with lustres, tapering coloured candles, fans tilted aslant, shell tea-caddies, painted patch-boxes, couples of china cats spotted with flowers, ramping dark ivory Chinese dogs, one widowed shepherdess with only the clock to smile at, a tall rosy clock from Dresden (a heart on its pendulum, silent under a shade), a small gold clock, ticking. There were curling-up photographs of Benito the kitten and drawings of a steel cathedral cut out by Emmeline but not framed. And, drooping out of a claret-glass, three white roses; roses a girl had worn at a party, a litde brown at the tips.

Cecilia’s eye lit on these. “A party?” she said. “Last night? Oh, you never told me!”

AT THE PARTY WHERE EMMELINE WORE THE WHITE ROSES she met for the first time a friend of Cecilia’s, Julian Tower: thirty-nine, very tall and immaculate, with hair brushed back from a high forehead, grey eyes in deep sockets and a pleasant, formal smile. She had heard Cecilia complain of his manner as almost excessively moderate; worse, that he looked like one of those nice English actors who look so much more like gentlemen than like actors that beside them an ordinary gentleman would appear theatrical. All the same, she had heard of him as agreeable; he struck her as sympathetic. Though he came a good deal to Oudenarde Road, she had always been out at that hour or having a bath before dinner. It seemed to surprise him that
she
was Cecilia’s sister-in-law; he looked at her doubtfully.

“But why not?” said Emmeline. “You would not expect us to be alike.”

“Oh, no,” he said, still unconvinced, and remarked how funny it was that they had never met. “Though I’ve known you by sight for some time without knowing you were you— Or do you and she make a point of not knowing each other’s friends?”

“No, why?” she said, surprised. “Surely that would be foolish?”

They danced and sat down again. Emmeline, who had drunk throughout the evening nothing but iced tea, remained cool-looking and—as uproar heightened around her and couples yelled into each other’s crimsoning faces—so singular in her correctness of manner as to seem solitary, though she was never alone. Once or twice she gazed round, turning her head on her slender long neck, as though wondering why she had come to this party at all. Having left her glasses at home she recognised nobody till they came into close range, when consternation would mingle with her surprise.

Julian, already at some disadvantage through not feeling quite himself, wished they need not have met so far on in the evening. Very modern lighting heightened an unreality; the high walls were blanched with light at the corners and cornices, rooms seen through doors had a flat, hard brilliance, like lit-up mirrors. Julian with a brandy and soda, Emmeline with another glass of iced tea withdrew to a settee half way up the staircase, in an alcove alarmingly flooded with white light. In her bright silver dress her figure appeared shadowless: she blinked, watching people go up and down.

“I’m afraid,” Julian said, “you don’t think this is much of a party.”

“Don’t you?”

“I hate most parties: I hardly ever go.”

“I am rather enjoying myself,” she said, “I go to a good many.”

She sipped her tea, gazing past him neutrally, while he more and more wished they had met elsewhere. A diffident man, he relied too blindly on formula: it was his idea of a party that having drunk more than you wanted you asked questions you still rather dimly considered impertinent: nothing mattered next day. His wits, from which he had early parted for this false confidence and woolly sense of expansion, were now badly needed for Emmeline. Evidently his party manner did not go down well with her; she made him feel foolish, as though he were wearing a paper cap.

“Cecilia’s quite well,” she said, after an interval.

“She’s in Sicily, isn’t she?”

“Not exactly, no; tonight she is in the train, before that she was in Umbria. She will be back to-morrow.”

Emmeline delivered this information a shade sadly; it must have a cold ring for him now. For she had fancied she saw in Cecilia, towards the end of the winter, the earliest symptoms of boredom with Julian Tower. She did not speak of him nearly so often, and certainly saw him less. Or else, conceivably, he had been getting tired of her, which she must have resented. Mutability seemed to Emmeline natural; if her own friends, like her evening dresses, outlasted Cecilia’s, it was simply because she did not wear them so hard or—to pursue the sartorial image—cut so close to the figure. … In this case Emmeline was mistaken: it was simply that Julian—who had inherited a rather too flourishing family business of more than two hundred years’ standing—had had less time recently than the most indulgent of women could understand. His thoughts still turned to St. John’s Wood; he was still more than half in love with Cecilia and half hoped to marry her. He knew quite well she had been in Umbria, not in Sicily. But perversity moves one at times to affect an ignorance that must pass for indifference as to the movements of some dear friend, or to put a faintly malicious construction on their behaviour, for the sake of some stranger too bored to tell truth from error. Emmeline took little interest in his mistake.

“Cecilia tells me you’re always busy,” he said. “You do something special, don’t you?”

“I am a shipping agent: I run a travel agency.”

“I see. Like Cook’s.”

“No.”

“Just a travel agency… . How very nice.”

“Yes, it is nice.” Evidently this was an affair of passion: glancing once or twice at his white tie, no higher, always returning her eyes to her frosted glass—in which she kept tipping about an icy circle of lemon, a long spray of mint—she began to talk rapidly, fully alive. “Our organization is really far-reaching,” she said. “We can tell anyone almost everything: what to avoid, what to do in the afternoons anywhere —Turkestan, Cracow—what to do about mules, where it’s not safe to walk after dark, how little to tip. We have made out a chart of comparative dinner times all over Europe, so’s people need not waste their evenings; we are just bringing out a starred list of places good out of season and manufacturing towns that sound awful where there is really something to see. We keep very much up to date. My partner is doing a rather interesting graph of civic intelligence. We’ve got a slogan: ‘Move dangerously’—a variant of ‘Live dangerously,’ you see. It took us some time to think out, but I think it’s effective. We’re having it stamped on our circulars.”

“But do your railway companies like that?”

“I don’t know,” said Emmeline, “we haven’t asked them. The great thing is to reach a particular public.”