Authors: Elizabeth Bowen
A fact unknown to Jane was that, some seven years after her first child’s birth, Lilia had made a bolt for London. Whether Montefort or Fred’s taciturnities or his infidelities, actual or supposed, all of a sudden became too much for her never went on to record: she simply wrote that she was not expecting to be returning. The letter reached Fred at the height of harvest: he had had no time to do more than post it on to Antonia, with a marginal scribble in his own hand—he indeed, he said, felt badly if this were his fault. Young Jane was being, he added, as good as gold. Antonia, given to picture what a high time must have set in at Montefort, had been as much riled by Fred’s equanimity as by his wife’s defection. She had cut short a tour abroad and gone straight to FiUham, where, in the masionnette of her sister (then still living) Lilia inevitably was. Some time went to breaking the truant down. Repetitions of ‘I will never go back to him!’ at the start almost passionate, had grown fainter. Where, in that case,
did
Lilia intend to go? That had produced a blank though obstinate silence.
‘And what,’ Antonia pursued, ‘do you plan to live on?—Your sister?’
Lips had been compressed. ‘No: I have money.’
‘That’s impossible!’
‘Yes; I have parted with my engagement ring.’
‘You don’t mean, Guy’s?’
‘Yes I do,’ had maintained the poor mouth. ‘What else had I? Fred never gave me one.’
‘Damn: I forgot to see to that!—Still, he needs you.’
‘He’s got Jane.’
‘Yes—and who’s to look after
her?’
‘That’s
why you expect me to go back?’
‘Fred wants you back.’
‘Who says so? Never a line from him.’
‘He’s got his pride and he hasn’t got your address. Idiot,
because
he needs you he’s got his pride!’
‘He can look for someone to do the chickens.’
‘Obviously, he loves you—if you must have it!’
‘How many years, I wonder, is it since of that he gave me a sign?’
‘He’s a queer fish, remember.’
‘What do
you
know of Fred?’
Antonia’s letter to Fred had opened by asking about the harvest: ‘This year, how have we done?’ She hoped, not too badly—for she must now request him to turn his attention to something else.
In re
Lilia, what had he thought of doing? In her own view, there were not two ways about it—it was up to him to come over and patch things up. The sooner the better. Lilia would
come
back but never
go
back—let Fred use his head and see the distinction! She gave the Fulham address and enclosed a cheque—for, she said, incidental expenses. For a week, she said, she would ask no questions: by the end of that week she would expect to hear of their both being back, as before, at Montefort. For, she need not remind him, the taking-on (and that meant permanent taking-on) of Lilia had been his side of the bargain. Or was he proposing to let the whole thing lapse? If so, she must make other plans for Montefort—sorry as she would be. And womanless, of course, he could not keep Jane: sad, but, as he no doubt saw, the child would have to be handed over.—If he cared to know, Lilia was most unhappy. Speechless, helpless. Other than Fred, whom had she?
Fred’s reaction to Antonia’s whip-cracking had been forthwith to tear up the cheque. He was about to tear up the letter too, but scowled and meditated again over the threat in final sentences. Paris was worth a mass: he did in the end go to London, and re-wooed Lilia. The reconciliation, although brief, was signalized by the conception of Maud. Antonia succeeded in tracing, and brought back, the hoop of sapphires chosen by Guy for Lilia: she posted the ring to its owner at Montefort—the packet arrived when Lilia was in the throes of morning sickness. Nothing was spoken of again.
Maud put the lid on everything…Jane, however, just could recall the homecoming: Lilia fresh from London, languidly-dashing new in a scarlet suit, dropping a kiss on the head of her harmless daughter, and in the same way bestowing a florid doll on the child who marvelled: ‘She does not mind me.’ ‘She could afford to love me, or almost thought so,’ Jane could have almost thought. The memory, apart from containing scarlet, was the more brilliant for having no shadow of sense—could she have dreamed it? was it out of a novel? Nothing before or after gave it support. Among other scenes, the picture fitted in nowhere; it was like a card astray from another pack. There it somewhere was, but it did not trouble the girl. Moreover Jane, it must be recalled, had till now never courted memories—all her own had been random; the awesome attraction of other people’s had not been felt by her till now.
‘Oh, of course,’ Jane said civilly, ‘there was father.’
‘There still is.’
‘Yes,’ agreed the girl, more uneasily, ‘yes, of course. But one forgets people when they are always there.’ She bent over the magazine, falling silent, till her mother remarked: ‘
That
almost sounds like her coming back. Whoever is she talking to on the stairs?’
Miss Francie re-entered, with a reminiscent smile. She glided towards and picked up the pink comb, flourished it and set upon Lilia’s hair as though fresh inspiration had come in absence. Lilia quivered— ‘You’ll get both sides the same?’
‘If we don’t,’ vowed Miss Francie gaily, ‘we’ll do still better!—Your little girlie’s waiting, down on the stairs; I all but fell over her. Aren’t children wonderfully patient!’
‘What was Maud doing?’
‘Whatever it was, she was deep in it. Tell me now, has she ever some kind of a dream companion?’
The intensity of a brought-about recollection leaves one worn down; it consumes cells of the being if not the body. Truth goes on to eat through the weakened fabric. That afternoon, when the others had gone to sleep and Fred off into his working limbo, Lilia returned to the stone bench, in search of the serenity left behind there. But not a trace of the morning was in the garden—the tanglewood had closed in again on its own story; aloof stood the sundial; only the parching colours lingered mockingly on. To be less alone, she had come out carrying sewing—she was at work on a pink chemise. But dipping in vain for scissors into her workbox, grimacing as she bit off threads, she still stood under that station clock. The clock-hands stood still: she was seventeen.
The mistake had been, going to see Guy go—that altogether had been too life-like. Saying to Jane ‘he was gone already,’ she had put the feel of the thing at its least awful. What obstinacy, what cry of her growing heart for even this as a consummation had, in spite of all, brought her to that last train? For the fact was, he had told her not to be there. Yet there, with a trembling conventionality, Lilia was. Khaki, khaki—over the crowds she finally, victorious, saw his head turning this way, that way, searching for something, someone. She swam with her elbows, got through, touched him. Round flashed his face, lit up—only to fall. ‘Why on earth did
you
come?’ She told him: ‘I wanted to see the last of you,’ and, pulling her glove off, made him see, as one might show a pass, the engagement ring’s day-or-night-blue winking sapphires. ‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘do wear it! You’ll wear it, won’t you?’
‘Always.’
So he had kissed her. Tied in a flapper bow her hair meanwhile swung down to her waist: reaching round her, he tweaked at a tip of it, and his arm was with her a moment longer. So they stood, re-enacting what was all done with. ‘Be a good girl,’ he told her, tenderly, lastingly, lightly, ‘and go home—won’t you?’ She broke away, wanting only to vanish. But she found herself walled in, wedged to a stop amongst rooted oblivious sayers of the goodbye. Hardly more than three steps was she from where he was, with no shelter from him but her turned-away back. Somebody then heaved in between him and her. She had no means of not overhearing him exclaim:
‘Youl’
The
‘You
!’ came out of him in tone unknown, unfamiliar to Lilia, familiar elsewhere. Memorably a voice came back with:
‘Why not, after all? I’m the family’… ‘Why for God’s sake, then, didn’t you wear a hat?’… ‘I’ve no idea. What an inferno! Where’s this girl you’re marrying?’… ‘Been and gone’… ‘Then who were you looking out for?’… ‘Just a face’… ‘Oh, a face, yes?’… ‘A face I might possibly see again’… ‘How possibly?’… ‘You never know, you know’… ‘Well, I’ll be moving on’… ‘No, stop a minute’… ‘No, I think I’ll be moving on’…‘No, stop a minute; listen, Antonia’… ‘These infernal echoes’… ‘All right, go, then!’
He added:
‘You’ll
never see the last of me!’
Antonia unlike Lilia got clean away—so fast that the
fiancée,
though craning her neck, never so much as set eyes upon the cousin, though one could keep track of her thrusting course. Lilia indeed effected her own escape in the backwash from the fleeing Antonia, and so got to safety under the clock. There she stayed, ascribing thoughts to herself, putting on again the glove she had taken off—that done, being able to think of no other kind of livingness to imitate, she seceded from life and became marble. She set up as a statue, posed there smirking at nothing—and why not? Nothing made sense, till at last it seemed the station had heard the train with him in it, gone, go—cheers were no more, nor was the singing. Blindly those who began to weep streamed past. Nothing was left behind but the overheard words.
It was not to be thought of, so never was.
Had
it been seen again, that awaited face?
Had
she come to the train, that last-moment comer? If so, who was she; if not, what was she not?
Was
she—did she exist? Did he expect her, did he invent her? There had stood he and Antonia, jibing at one another up to the end. ‘You never know, you know.’ Better uncertainty; best no answer. Who desires to know what they need not? So why continue to wonder, so why suffer? Yes, but if not the Beloved, what was Lilia? Nothing. Nothing was left to be.
And now these letters. To whom, why?
Are you to be leaving me nothing, O Guy, then?
Lilia let fall her sewing. A pink-silk reel ran from her along the bench, to be stopped in the crack where the fern grew. A young thrush flew in affright from the twisted apple tree, and away in a corner a door creaked; somebody had come in and was in this garden. But not again a sound, not a step—there ensued more than a silence of moss, sloth, airlessness and the exhausted river: something more than human was at intensity. In depth, dead-still, branches screened the doorway—of whom was this the ghost in the afternoon?
Only since Guy’s day was it that undeniably the roses had run to briar, the wall so loosened as to start falling stone by stone down into the ravine. Now it was not so much that the decay was more rapid or widespread, but that it was apparent—out it stood! Nothing now against it maintained the place. Struggle there was, as not in his day; but never a heedless victory—gone was the master-touch of levity, nerve or infatuation. The crazed perfection he saw, once, into the place left a trace of itself, but in such a way as to make it the more to be felt to be gone, with him. Yes, in his way he had kept Montefort up—up, that was, to his own high idea of it. Hard was it not to tax him with, by having carelessly turned away, having somehow hastened the trend to ruin in such a life or lives as his own had touched. By striking when it did, before he had tried to see, even, whether he
could
consolidate, death made him seem a defaulter, a runner-out upon his uncon-summated loves. He had stirred up too much; he had scattered round him more promises as to some dreamed-of extreme of being than one man could have hoped to live to honour. Yet, on the other hand, had he come back, had he lived out the ordinary day, would this extraordinary power of his illusion have stayed so strongly? As it was, here it hung in the air over scene and people, going on affecting them, working on them, causing them most to dread to decline from being as once he saw them, and most to desire they knew not what. He had not finished with them, nor they with themselves, nor they with each other: not memories was it but expectations which haunted Montefort. His immortality was in their longings, while each year more mocked the vanishing garden.
Lilia supposed only one thing— ‘You’ve come to tell me?’ Her heart beat wonderfully calmly: she retrieved the pink reel, pressed it into her workbox, closed the lid, laid her folded sewing upon it and sat to wait. She took a view of her left hand, now only dressed in Fred’s wedding ring, while hop by hop nearer came back the thrush, unbelievingly fixing her with its eye. Amazement surrounded her but was not her own; second after second was to be counted by the apprehensive springing and landing of the bird, whose prints left here and there a smudge in the dust. No longer could she abide the waiting to know: suddenly she stood up and, bringing her workbox with her, perhaps to show him how deedy her married days were, set off down the path which led to the door, proceeding or wading through the white glare with the majesty or immunity of a sleep-walker. Not an enemy briar dared cross her way now Lilia was not retreating but advancing.
But just short of the corner of the path, she already—as one does see the brilliant image of him or her whom one is to meet in reality in a moment—saw him. Both were deep in love. The breathless girl stopped to put down the woman’s workbox under a bush, then, head higher than ever, went round the corner.