Friends and Lovers Page 13

  “You don’t need to be so cruel about Florence,” Margaret said, in swift defence. “She’s as clever as you are—perhaps cleverer.”

  “That wouldn’t be difficult,” David said lightly. He rose, and cleared away the cups and saucers. “Come on, Meg, let’s get to bed. I am beginning to feel exhausted.”

  She said suddenly, “You are going up to Oxford the week before term starts, aren’t you?”

  David looked at her in surprise. “I don’t know yet. I might stay here until term begins.” At the end of September Penny would be arriving in London.

  “But you said you were going up early to Oxford this term.”

  “I have been thinking it would be cheaper to stay here: it would save me an extra week of battels.”

  “Why can’t you say ‘bills’? That Oxford talk gives me a pain, as if you were all in some secret society or something.” Her voice was angry.

  “Everyone says battels, and has been saying it for centuries: it won’t be dropped just because you don’t like it, Margaret.” He looked at her worried face. “Come on. Out with it. Why do you want me to go back a week earlier than necessary?”

  She was disconcerted by the unexpected question. She hesitated, and then came out with the truth flatly. “I’ve asked Florence to come here for that week.”

  David stared at her. “You mean she is going to have my room?”

  “Don’t get angry. You’ll waken Father. Besides, as long as you haven’t a job, just where are we to find a guest-room when we need it?”

  He ignored the jibe. “How long is she going to be here?”

  “Until she finds new digs. Her landlady last year was horrid. Objected to the piano being played.”

  “Probably didn’t want it to be pounded into matchwood.”

  “You can save your witticisms for Oxford. You are all so gay and lordly there, aren’t you?”

  David restrained his rising temper. “Did you ask Father about this? I don’t imagine an invalid particularly enjoys a stranger crashing all over his house.”

  “Florence won’t disturb Father. Besides, you might remember that if it weren’t for me this house would not exist. Who looks after it and keeps it going? As well as giving those awful piano lessons to make enough money for a little tuition at the College of Music?”

  As usual, David was beaten. When Margaret started enumerating her virtues he was always beaten.

  David said, “Look, this is a silly hour of the morning to start having arguments. Come on, Meg.” He walked over to the kitchen window, opened it, and promptly let two large moths and a swarm of gnats into the room. “Oh, damn!” he said. “Switch off the light, Meg, and keep the rest of these blighters outside. Why can’t there be something invented to let you have windows open and lights on and still be comfortable in summer?”

  “Men are so good at changing the subject,” Margaret said acidly, as she rose and switched out the light.

  And some women, David thought, don’t change the subject often enough. Anyway, the light was now out, and they could start moving upstairs, and he could have half an hour of peace before he went to bed. But he found himself standing by the window, looking out into the small square of garden turned to silver in the bright moonlight. The rambling roses, which his mother had planted some years ago, now spread over the wooden fences which separated this garden from the others. The grass was worn thin in patches where his father’s invalid-chair rested through the day.

  Margaret came over to stand beside him. She watched him curiously. “What is worrying you?” she asked. Six weeks in Scotland... Oxford... What had he to complain about?

  David said slowly, “Father. There is a big change in him even in these last six weeks. I got quite a shock when I saw him.” David suddenly saw again the thin, hopeless face staring up at the blank ceiling. “Wish we could get him into the country.”

  “How? James, bring round the Rolls—no, I think the Daimler tonight, and we’ll drive down to Little Toad-in-the-Hole.” She paused, and then, as David didn’t reply, the mockery left her voice, and she said, “Don’t worry, David. Father is all right. I look after him well. It is probably only this ghastly weather. You know we tried to persuade him to go and live in the country. But he says that London has always been his home, and that he is lonely when he’s away from it. He likes the distant noises: he listens for the trains, and for the boats on the river. And he sits for hours beside his bedroom window watching the children playing in the Walk. Besides, what would I do in the country?”

  “He has lost heart since Mother died; that’s what is wrong with him,” David said. “That’s the whole trouble.” His father had been an uncomplaining invalid, even cheerful, in spite of the long, throttling siege of illness. It had tightened slowly but surely from the time he had been invalided out of the Army— he had been one of the survivors of the Kut garrison—partly because of wounds, partly because of some Middle East microbe which continued to attack him long after the wounds had healed. At first his father had resented the idea of being condemned to illness for the rest of his life: he had tried to pick up his career where 1914 had interrupted it. But that had been impossible. It was then that his mother, the impractical woman, had become the practical leader of the family: they had moved from St John’s Wood to this house in Cory’s Walk, and their whole life had been scaled down to meet the new necessity. And his mother had succeeded, with work and care and thought, in making a home where there could even be laughter. But now his father’s will to live had gone. In these last four years he had become silent and moody.

  “In spite of all their bad luck, they were really happy,” David said quietly.

  Margaret was silent for a moment. “The moonlight is making you sentimental,” she said briefly. Wouldn’t Mother have been happier if she had never married? She would have made a big success as a concert pianist.

  “How could she ever have been happy?” Margaret added, in a harsh, angry voice.

  “She was,” David said quietly. “You had only to look at her face to see that. She never thought she had sacrificed anything, compared to what Father had given up. He would have been a good architect if the War hadn’t come along. And he was never as bitter about that as he could have been. Said he wasn’t the only one who was left a crock.”

  “And just how much credit was given us for that? Those who didn’t suffer because of the War forgot very easily, it seems to me.”

  David glanced quickly at his sister’s bitter face. “It would have been worse for all of us if we had lost the War. That’s what Father keeps saying, and he is right. What angers him today is the way we forget that, the way that it has become fashionable not to talk like that. It is a pity, isn’t it, that people will follow fashions even if it kills them? Like a lot of diabetics insisting on eating chocolates.”

  Margaret stirred impatiently, and then moved slowly towards the kitchen door. She didn’t like this kind of talk.

  Father’s mind had never progressed beyond the year 1919, but it was a pity that he should influence David like this. David, with all his advantages... (In such moments she always chose to forget that David had provided for his own education since the age of twelve by winning competitive examinations, that he had already won three scholarships to Oxford, which not only paid for his tuition and lodgings and food, but allowed a margin for a careful budget in books and clothes.)

  “It is after two o’clock. I’m going to bed,” she said.

  Good, David thought.

  “Besides, the War was all a mistake,” Margaret went on, not leaving well enough alone. “We should stop talking about it.”

  “I’ve always wondered why a war should have been thought important enough to let so many be killed and maimed if it can be forgiven and forgotten so easily.”

  “If everyone had been like the workers, with no vested interests to think of, there would have been no war.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting nationalism? The German workers put on uniforms and march
ed. The others had to march too, or be marched over. You’ve found every reason why there should have been no war, except the practical one. What do you do when another nation puts on uniform and starts marching? Just lie down and wave your legs feebly?”

  “Don’t be so coarse, David. The trouble with you is that you don’t take things seriously enough. You are just not politically conscious, that’s all.”

  David grinned. “Been seeing much of Breen recently?” he asked innocently. Roger Breen, another of Margaret’s peculiar friends... Why couldn’t Meg choose someone who was pleasant to have about the house just for a change?

  Margaret said nothing, but the way she set down her feet on the stairs and the angle at which she held her head described her annoyance sufficiently. She was probably thinking up some corker to give him as a parting thought. David was right: she paused at her bedroom door to say, “It never is any use arguing with your preconceived ideas, David. Your holiday with the rich and powerful has only made you more of a reactionary.”

  David still smiled, but his eyes had hardened. “See you at breakfast,” he said. “I’ve got a scarf tucked away somewhere in my bag for you; couldn’t find that Gaelic music, but we may be able to track it down in London if it interests you.”

  “Thank you, David. You shouldn’t have bothered.” She was embarrassed, conscious of the change in her tone of voice. “I’m sorry I was cross. It’s the heat, I think. And I’ve been worried. Just things, you know. My music, and Father, and everything.” She turned away suddenly. “Good night, David,” she said, in a suddenly muffled voice.

  “Good night.” Poor old Meg, he thought suddenly. There wasn’t anything wrong with her which a legacy of a hundred pounds could not cure. That was all most people needed: just a sense of a little security. They could face their problems more easily then.

  In his room he unpacked his writing-pad from his bag, and placed his books in their proper place beside the others in his bookcase. The row of titles welcomed him home. Plato, Hegel, Descartes, Kant, Fichte, Mills, Marx, Locke, Bentham, Rousseau, Engels... Not politically conscious, he remembered. Roger Breen was, of course; although one had to wonder sometimes when talking to him if he moved his lips when he read. Home Sweet Home, David thought.

  He sat wearily down on the hard chair at his desk. He pulled the crumpled letter from his pocket. Too emotional, too damned cocksure of himself. Yet it said what he wanted to say. If he could see his future clearly he would say it. But he had nothing but uncertainty before him, and he couldn’t say it. His sister and his father, each in their own way, had reminded him of that. He tore the letter to pieces. He suddenly felt miserably tired and unhappy.

  He wrote a very simple note, beginning “Dear Penny” and ending with “Yours sincerely, David Bosworth.” He thanked her for the pleasant day he had enjoyed in Edinburgh, he hoped he would see her in Oxford or in London.

  He read the note again. Suddenly he added a postscript. When would she arrive in London, and what was her address to be? Quickly he closed the envelope, stamped it, addressed it. You thought you were a fool, he told himself, as he changed his shoes for his thin slippers, which would make less noise on the staircase, because you let yourself see her again. But you would be a bigger fool if you hadn’t...or if you don’t.

  Once he was quietly out of the house he ran swiftly towards the pillar-box at the corner of Cory’s Walk. The next collection was six thirty A.M. Good. Farther down the street he saw the solitary figure of a policeman. It had recognised him. He saluted back, and then hurried towards his house.

  It was cooler now, and the night sky was beginning to lighten. He stood by the open window feeling the first stirring of the early morning breeze on his shoulders as he pulled off his shirt. It was strange how natural he could be with Penny, as if he were walking with only himself for company: no feeling of effort or strain. That came before a meeting with her, or afterwards, but when he was with her... He kept thinking about Penny as he undressed and prepared for bed. And he kept thinking about her, even after he had fallen into a restless sleep.

  13

  COUNTERPOINT

  Margaret had gone to Cornwall, and the month passed pleasantly in Cory’s Walk. Mrs. Trumble, Margaret’s weekly stand-by, now came in for an hour each day to “wash up and dust round,” as she said. She was a silent, smiling woman who—with a husband out of work and nine children below employable age—was glad to add a few extra shillings to the family’s dole. Beyond the fact that she lived near the river, and that her eldest son was called Ernie, and was a bright lad at school (this information was called forth only by the quantity of books on David’s desk), David could learn little about her. She did her work quickly, and then departed in quiet haste to merge into her own mysterious orbit once more. He would have been amazed to hear the intricate discussions on Number 7 Cory’s Walk, in Mrs. Trumble’s kitchen, with her visiting neighbours over a dish of tea. “Give me men every time,” Mrs. Trumble would say, and her visitors, all with at least six children to their credit, would agree.

  Certainly life in Cory’s Walk had become very simple. Mr. Bosworth seemed to enjoy it. If meals were not always punctual or even elaborate they could be digested in peace. And David was happy: his work was going well, and the odd hours spent with his father in the garden were pleasant for both men. They talked about the things his father liked to discuss—about the war that was so long over and yet was still so fresh in his father’s mind, about politicians’ limitations, about the Middle East, about the news in today’s papers, about Oxford, about the constant elections in Germany, about David’s possible future. He had always got on well with his father, but now he seemed to understand him still better.

  And it was easy to be happy with this new background of elation to all his thoughts. He was writing twice a week to Scotland, and twice a week he had his replies. He would have written every day if Mr. Lorrimer had not to be reckoned with. Penny reported that a letter even twice a week was raising eyebrows in one half of the family and amused comment in the other half. Her first reply had been as stilted as his first letter. And then, as his letters had become fuller, she had gradually thawed out. When he had changed to “My dear Penny” he had become “My dear David.” She wouldn’t have done that if she hadn’t at least liked him. He convinced himself of that, remembering her upbringing and background. This, in a way, put all the responsibility of future developments completely on his shoulders. But in a way, too, that was how he as a man wanted it to be. The delicate balance of human relationships, of a woman and a man with two separate and well-defined personalities learning to adjust them to each other, would have been overweighted if she had been more confident, more dominant than he was.

  He no longer tried to rationalise or justify his summer madness. He was content to feel the excitement which raced through his blood when he saw her neat, decided writing on an incoming envelope, or to hold the happiness which swept over him when he took his pen and sat down to write to her. And he knew instinctively that if he once let her slip he would never find her again.

  September came at last, with its greyer skies and cool evenings. The mists hung over the river at night, and spread northward towards Cory’s Walk, leaving a few wisps to trail over the gardens in the morning. The roses were fading, and hung full and loose-petalled on the branch ready to be scattered over summer’s grave.

  People like Margaret Bosworth, who had been out of town, returned with brown and healthy faces to mock those whose earlier summer holidays were already forgotten. She came back with a new store of energy, which she proceeded to use in deploring the state into which the house had fallen during her absence. David and his father retired unanimously into their own rooms to read. Mrs. Trumble’s hurt feelings developed into sciatica, and she stayed away for a couple of weeks, to return when she decided that she had asserted her independence sufficiently and that Ernie needed a new pair of boots for school.

  It was bad enough, David reflected, to have this torn
ado of energy strike with full force, to be made to feel he ought to offer his help, to have his routine completely upset and his work made more difficult, without being conscious of the fact that all this was happening because of the Rawson woman. After all, Margaret said, the house could not just be run to suit him alone. True enough, but still damned annoying.

  She had made that remark when they were washing up the supper dishes together. (“If I take time off my own work to cook for you I don’t see why you can’t take time off to help clear things up.” Again, true enough. But still damned annoying.) Then she removed her rubber gloves, looked at her hands critically, and massaged some lotion into them. “I’ll go upstairs now,” she said. “I have some Busoni studies to practise before Roger comes to collect me.”

  And I’ll come and insist you move the piano to another corner of the room when you are in the middle of them, David thought.

  “What’s amusing you, David? You needn’t laugh at piano exercises. They are hard work.”

  “I know. How’s your Jeux d’Eau coming along?”

  “Slowly. I’ll have it perfect in another week.”

  In time for dear Florence, David thought. Yet Margaret’s actions, from Margaret’s point of view, were all justifiable. She was the mistress of this house by virtue of her work in it. Her father was the master, paying for the rent and food out of his pension. David was only a boarder, who contributed his share to the household expenses when he was at home.