Friends and Lovers Page 17

  In fact, Penny learned, only a very few of the teachers or students could afford the luxury of striking romantic attitudes. Work was quite as urgent as in her father’s law office; only, here, because people had chosen a career whose success would rarely be measured in money, but rather in doing as well as possible in what they liked to do, there was less feeling of being bound to a machine and more sense of freedom in behaviour and ideas. Money was counted as something useful, but it was always the means to the end, the means of being free enough economically to devote oneself entirely to painting or sculpture, and never an end in itself.

  Penny began to learn these things in October, and she began to learn about her own work too, but hardly in the way she had imagined. After the first weeks of loneliness, shyness, and disturbing fears over her probable inadequacy, she settled down to prove to herself that she was not an object for pity. It turned out to be an extremely painful process.

  For after some weeks of proving that her work was not so bad after all, she found that nothing she was painting pleased her. Yet it was still the same kind of work, developed of course, which she had done last year. It had not changed. But it did not please her any more. It was then that she realised that she had changed, that her work had not, and that was the whole trouble. Somewhere, somehow, she had adopted ideas and little tricks in painting which had seemed to make her work promising. Now she was finding that these ideas, these tricks, had carried her as far as they ever would. There was no possibility of growth in them.

  That was a very upsetting admission to make.

  Still more upsetting was the decision to start almost at the beginning again, to change her conception of painting, to give up much of what had once given her most pride. At first it was disheartening. She had abandoned ideas which, even if they had turned out to be limited, were certainly as good as any of those held by the average students. And it seemed as if she had found nothing to replace them.

  Then gradually something began to develop.

  Symington, the teacher whom she respected most (his own work was excellent, and, strangely enough, was admired not only by his fellow-artists and pupils, but also by the public), was an interested observer of all this. Because he was a good teacher as well as a good painter he did not upset her with advice, but waited until she was ready to come and ask for it. “So you have cleared all the furniture out of the room?” he said, with a smile, and that was the only reference he made about the battle that had taken her twelve full weeks. But he gave her a good deal of help—more than he usually gave to women students.

  By February she was happy in her work again, although she knew she was only at the very beginning. And she knew that she had still to find out whether it would be as good as she wanted it to be; and that gave her just enough uncertainty to keep her from the fault of over confidence, so that her mind was open and willing to learn.

  She would have been both pleased and amazed if she had known that Symington had already picked her out as good material with more than average possibilities. And she would have been more than amazed to hear his comment on her to one of his colleagues. “The pity of it is, she will marry. Then no more painting. As a teacher I find it deplorable,” Symington had finished, “but as a man I find it highly satisfactory.” But then, some ten years ago, he had married one of his prettiest pupils, whose painting had since been confined to funny drawings for four picture-loving children. His colleague, who was listening to this peculiarly masculine remark, had always been able to disprove most of Symington’s little philosophies. But that day his arguing power had been weakened, for his mistress (who had never given up her career) had just left him, on the charge that he was “smothering her individuality.”

  Penny might have been amazed and indignant, but it was perfectly true that, although she still took her work with complete seriousness, she had begun to think less and less of winning a scholarship to study in Rome. Or to live anywhere abroad which would separate her from David.

  And it was not only her future ambitions which David had altered. There was this strange reaction in making new friends. After the first week, when the students had eyed one another, hesitated, circled vaguely around, given offhand smiles, tried out a few casual remarks, and then suddenly had begun to form the little groups which ate together, went to concerts and theatres together, walked and talked together, Penny had had her share of masculine interest. There would be someone who would drift over towards her place in the classroom and look at her work and begin talking. Or there would be an oblique approach to the lunch-table where she sat. Or accidental meetings at the College gates which happened too regularly. She was flattered, for vanity, catlike, cannot resist purring when it is stroked. But that didn’t let her fall into the delusion that she should accept any invitations “just to be kind,” as so many of the other girls looked at it. What kindness was there in letting a man waste an evening of his life on you? For that was the trouble: she liked several of the men and some were attractive, but none of them raised more than a friendly smile in her, and none gave her what David gave her. That was the trouble: she would always make that comparison now.

  Among the women there were those who sought out her company, and she accepted some of them more readily. They were safer. And yet, even with them, it seemed as if she couldn’t give them the same full interest that she would have given them a year ago. It was as if David used up so much of her thoughts and her emotions that there was little left to share out among others.

  In Edinburgh she had made friends easily. But now she was neglecting them too. She forgot to write, and then would remember that with sudden attacks of remorse which were intense but brief. Apart from her letters to her family giving them the news of life in London (with mentions of David slipped in here and there to prepare them for the idea that she and David were in love), Edinburgh now seemed a piece of her life which had been amputated and thrown away.

  Perhaps it is completely natural that women in love forget everything else. It is not selfishness, for their thoughts are not on themselves, but on those they love. It is an absorption, all the more complete as love increases, that shuts them away from any other emotional interests. Perhaps every woman has the devotion of the nun in her, whether it finds expression in beliefs or friendship or her children or her lover. This world of their creating is enough: the rest is well lost.

  16

  WOMEN ONLY

  On this Saturday in February Penny was standing at the window of her small bedroom in Baker House. She was wrapped in her heavy dressing-gown, because the room was cold and the small electric fire only heated an area of three square feet in front of it. She was all ready for Mrs. Fane’s party except for the dress, which lay on the bed until she could press it out. Neri, the Indian student who lived on this floor, was in occupation of the communal ironing-board which stood in the little alcove at the end of the passage, and it took a long time to iron a sari.

  Penny was thinking that she did not want to go in the least to this party. And yet she must. Mrs. Fane had been at school with her mother. Her mother kept writing, “Haven’t you visited Mattie Fane’s new house yet? It is so near you. She will be so disappointed if you don’t.” That, considered Penny, was rather an exaggeration. There was no evidence of any desire on Mrs. Fane’s part to make a special effort to entertain her old school friend’s daughter. Even this invitation to sherry today had come by telephone this morning, and had caught Penny quite unprepared with any feasible excuse, as telephone invitations always did. Still, it would be better to go to Mrs. Fane’s, and then everyone—her mother, Mrs. Fane, and herself—could relax and not worry about any more duty.

  Penny looked at the glistening pavements, wondered if her stockings would be ruined by ugly black splashes before she arrived at the party, wondered about Mrs. Fane (whom she had seen only once in her life, and that was six or seven years ago), wondered when Neri would have finished with the ironing-board, wondered what she would wear for David’s visit to Lo
ndon tomorrow, wondered if it would be decent weather then. It wouldn’t matter, of course, if it did pour with rain. Nothing could ruin Sunday. Sunday was the most perfect day in all the week.

  The door of her room opened, and a tall girl with fair hair, brushed smooth in the current Slade School fashion, entered slowly. “I did knock,” Lillian Marston said, “but you were dreaming.” She was slender as well as tall. Her eyes were large, grey-green, and very direct. Her wide, slow smile was lazy. Her movements were slow, too, deliberately so: she moved with a grace that did not seem calculated, but gave the appearance of being controlled. Her face was well shaped, and she liked to keep it quite pale without any hint of colour except in the bright lips. All this had considerable effect on the men she met. No one ever guessed that she had even noticed it.

  Penny had at first regarded Marston as unapproachable: Marston was in her final year, for one thing. But Marston had started coming in to see her, and a rather curious impersonal friendship was begun. In Baker House the Slade students kept together, as if they were in some tight trade union. They viewed other students who lived there—the scientists, the teachers to be, the future doctors, librarians, private secretaries—with a mixture of alarm and amusement. That they themselves were viewed with much the same attitude would have been a shock to most of them.

  Marston was wearing her grey-green suit today, with a dark red chiffon scarf folding softly into its neckline. She never wore jewellery except bracelets, but these she liked to clasp in heavy rows round one wrist.

  “Fun and games, I see,” she said, as she looked at the black dress on the bed. She settled herself comfortably in the armchair. “Or haven’t you made up your mind yet whether you are going out? Hideous day. I’ve been sleeping practically all afternoon.”

  “I’m waiting for Neri,” Penny explained.

  Marston laughed. “Everyone does. I think she irons one of those saris every day. The joy of living on the top floor: we have one ironing-board and Neri. Those bloated plutocrats downstairs have two ironing-boards to each floor and no Neri or her dresses.”

  “They aren’t dresses. They are works of art,” Penny said. “Six yards round the hem. She told me that very proudly the other day. It is the only complete sentence I have managed to get out of her so far.” Penny sat down on the bed, for her guest had taken the only comfortable chair, and curled up her legs to keep warm. “Imagine six yards of the thinnest embroidered muslin trailing over city streets in February rain.”

  “I wonder why she bothers to wear a sari in England? She catches cold so easily. And, in any case, the effect is quite ruined when she adds that brown cloth coat with its piece of fur at the neck. I suggested that one day to Neri, but she looked at me in a very hurt way. Hasn’t spoken to me since.” Marston lit a cigarette and studied her excellent hands. “Grubby,” she announced. “I’ll have to soak them to get rid of that charcoal.” Then she smiled as her thoughts flickered back to Neri. “Meanwhile I have the room next door to hers, and I am kept half awake all night by that cough she has developed.”

  “Well, she will look charming in June if she doesn’t die of pneumonia before that,” Penny said. She was watching the clock anxiously. She looked down at her dress to see if it really needed pressing. It did. It was a black one, bought at the expense of a month’s inadequate lunches. It looked smart in its simplicity (Penny had ripped off a lot of the extra trimming), but it did need constant pressing. “I am going to the Fanes’,” she explained, “and I have got to look presentable. Mother’s friends, you know.”

  “A party without David?” Marston asked teasingly. “Tomorrow is your day, of course. I forgot that,” she added, regarding Penny with a touch of amusement. “Sunday is the one day on which you get decent food in this place, and you always miss it. Of course, they probably calculated that a lot of girls would be invited out on Sundays, so it was a good day to pick for serving roast beef. Never mind, the trustees who pay visits on Sundays must approve of the food we get.”

  Penny laughed, opened the door, and looked discreetly into the corridor. She came back to the bed again, shaking her head ruefully, and glanced once more at the clock. “Now, if that were only you outside I could say ‘Hoy! Let me have that iron for just two minutes.’ But I don’t like to say that to Neri. She would probably think I was trying to throw my imperial weight about.”

  Marston nodded. “Makes it difficult,” she agreed, “unless you are like me and just don’t give a damn.” She shrugged her shoulders, smiled, and glanced round the room. She noticed the envelope waiting to be posted, which lay beside Penny’s handbag and gloves. She made no further reference to David, but she let herself wonder what on earth those two could have to say to each other that filled a letter every day. Each morning on the hall table there was a fat envelope from Oxford for Lorrimer. Sometimes registered, too, which aroused amusing ideas. She looked at Penny speculatively. Now was the time, she decided, to approach the question which had brought her here in the first place.

  “Lorrimer, I like you,” she said gravely, “but sometimes I do think you are certifiable.”

  Penny looked up in surprise from adjusting a stocking seam.

  “Let me prove it,” Marston said. “Are you coming with me to the dance tonight?”

  “Oh, I have a lot of things to do,” Penny said slowly.

  “Always some old excuse,” Marston said. “That is why you are certifiable. Lorrimer, have a look in your mirror. Go on. Look. Now see what I mean?”

  Penny turned away from the mirror above the small bureau. “No,” she said shortly.

  “I am only trying to say that there’s no possible harm in going out with at least some of the young men who plague you. They are mostly harmless enough. David Whatever-his-name-is couldn’t object to you going to the college dances at least. Besides, why on earth should you do everything he tells you? That isn’t good for a man—not good at all. Gives him ideas about being indispensable. Sorry, Lorrimer, I know it is none of my business, but frankly I have been aching to say these things for the last few months.” Marston looked at Penny with a sudden warm smile. She’s such a sweet innocent, she thought; just the kind to get badly hurt. And she is much too good value to get badly hurt.

  Penny said, “In the first place, I don’t really want to go to this dance as much as all that. In the second place, David doesn’t tell me to do anything.” She liked Lillian Marston, or she would not have bothered explaining. Besides, if Marston did not approve of the way Penny was arranging her life Penny did not see any particular wisdom in the way Marston arranged her own life. This consisted of frantic bursts of work, punctuating weeks of fun. You could always tell when the affair with Tom had ended: she worked for ten days as if she were driven by a demon. And then the affair with Dick would begin. You could tell when it ended too. She worked. And then the affair with Harry. And then work. But Tom and all the rest of them remained her friends once the quarrel was forgotten, and even the teachers treated Marston to less sarcasm than might be expected. For one thing, she had a certain good humour, a certain honesty, and such complete frankness in her actions that, although there were times to be angry with Marston, there were no moments when you despised her.

  “I don’t quite follow,” Marston said. “I thought you were acting under orders.”

  Penny shook her head. “I am perfectly free to do what I want. And I do what I want.”

  Marston stared, and then she lit another cigarette. “Struth,” she said. “I do believe the girl means it.” She spoke with real seriousness. She looked worriedly at Penny, hesitated, looked at her cigarette and then back at the younger girl’s face. “Frankly,” she said slowly, choosing her words carefully, “I’ve never known a man who didn’t go out with several girls even when he thought he was being serious about one. It is rather a harsh fact about life, but it is just as well to guard against it. Men have their own little way of bringing you back to earth. They are realists, you know. They will write poetry to your eyes, swea
r eternal devotion, and then sit enthralled through one of those Hollywood musicals because they like the shape of the legs in the first row.”

  Penny laughed. “But I like them too,” she said.

  Marston shrugged her shoulders. For a moment she could find nothing else to say. She was too busy thinking that the extraordinary thing about people was the way they surprised you.

  Penny said, “Have you ever thought, Marston, that if his one girl accepts invitations with other men, then that might be the reason why a man is so ‘realistic’?”

  “Look, I was the one who was giving out advice,” Marston said sharply. She rose, brushed the cigarette ash off her skirt, pulled its waist-band into the right position round twenty-four inches of firm flesh, and looked critically down at the way the material covered her slender thighs. “Well,” she said, suddenly business-like, “I’ll try to grab a place in the queue and get a bath before dinner. I take it you aren’t going dancing tonight? I thought so somehow. Poor old Derek will be disappointed. I came here to plead for him, you know. I’ll tell him you have the vapours. And that’s as good a description as any.”

  She walked to the door, turned to give one of her slow smiles, raised one eyebrow. She did this unconsciously now, ever since Derek—the Derek of some three months ago, that was—had told her she looked very much like Garbo. But from the corridor quite another kind of Marston reported on the ironing-board situation: India had declared, and it was now Scotland’s innings. And Penny smiled as she remembered Marston’s usual pretence that she didn’t know one end of a wicket from the other, and thought it quite remarkable how Marston never actually said either “Hello” or “Goodbye,” and yet one always remembered her coming and going.