Authors: Elizabeth Bowen
‘I do know it’s not the o’clock for this.’
‘Oh, very well,’ replied Lilia. ‘By all means. Just as you like.’ She added the candlestick to the glass and saucer and, keeping the pyramid they formed in precarious balance against her bosom, proceeded through the tricky dusk to the door—her form, the exhausted mauve of her cotton dress, by turns appearing opaque or ghostly. She was electing to move, as she sometimes did, with a sort of superior smoothness, as though trollied. Antonia lay watching suspiciously, then shot up.—’Hi, stop! You’re not taking away my matches?’
This caused a halt, once again on the creaking board.
‘As I never touch anything without first asking, your matches should be where they were. Aren’t they?’
‘No idea where they were.’
‘If you want to know, I can see them even from here.’ Lilia shifted her burden, set her right arm free and with it majestically pointed. The arm—white, soft skinned, still remarkably shapely—stayed outstretched, with unquivering forefinger, while Antonia, scuffling around the curtain, came on the matchbox, shook it and relapsed with a grunt.
‘Quite right. Oh, thank you. So sorry.’
‘Will that be all?’
Antonia, lighting a cigarette, sent a glance after the closing door.
Lilia, wife of Fred Danbv, mother of Jane and Maud, was half the hostess at Montefort, half not. There were times—of which this morning was one—when she felt either galled or weighed upon by the ambiguity. The fact was that Antonia owned the place, which had come to her upon the death of a cousin, and that the Danbys’ status here was uncertain, never secure, never defined. They were not her tenants, for they paid no rent; neither were they her caretakers, for they drew no salary. Fred farmed the land, and paid across to Antonia a half share of such profits as could be made; he and his family lived in the house for nothing, the best room in it being kept for Antonia to occupy when and how she chose. Of this arrangement it had not yet been decided whether it did or did not work, still less if it were equitable or, if not so, not so at whose expense. One could only say, it had lasted for twenty-one years, owing perhaps partly to all parties’ reluctance to sitting down and having anything out, or to binding themselves to anything hard-and-fast, or to thinking out anything better. Antonia shrank from bother; Fred worked too hard to have time for more, and Lilia’s brooding attitude was ambivalent—she disliked Montefort, wilted under the life here, but had ceased to more than dream of escape. As she saw it, here were herself and Fred kept dangling upon Antonia’s caprices; as against which, here was their patroness yearly drifting more into their debt and power. If the Danbys were to walk out—though indeed, to where?—Antonia would have to grapple with the decision she had so far staved off: whether to part with Montefort or to take it over. Her overweening sentiment for the place went, as her cousin’s had done before her, with neither wish nor ability to remain here always. Her visits were sudden and on the whole far apart; being more and more timed, of later years, to coincide with Jane’s returns home. The cost of Jane’s education—first at expensive boarding school, then abroad, lately at a select London secretarial college—had been met by Antonia: who knew how? Jane could now be held to be qualified for her first post: what it should be or when she should take it up was not yet decided… Maud, the second daughter, lived at home and attended the local Protestant school.
The relationship of the Danbys to Antonia was puzzling until one knew the story. Guy, one-time owner of Montefort, Antonia’s first cousin and dear ally, had, when he fell in battle early in 1918, been engaged to Lilia—at seventeen a wonderful golden willow of a girl. That enchanting love-on-a-leave, that idealization undoomed—as he probably knew—ever to fade so far failed to connect in Guy with outside reality that he had forgotten to make a Will. When he was killed, therefore, any money he had went, together with Montefort, to Antonia, who apart from anything else was his next of kin. The fiancee was left unprovided for. Antonia had felt this unfair, as it more than was. Unwilling to profit by Guy’s oversight, she sought out Lilia, whom she had
yet to meet. Lilia, already so dazed by Guy as to be only a shade more stupefied by his death, was indeed in a bad way—whirled by the courtship out of her natural sphere (suburbia merging into the Thames Valley), untrained to work and now not disposed to try, unfitted to take up life again with her own people, with whom Guy, it transpired, had made bad blood. Ill met, since this was the outcome, had Guy been by the ballroom blue moonlight of Maidenhead. It was clear, Lilia did not know where to turn. Had she been left alone, which she was not, life yet might have forced her on to her own feet: there could have been benefit, at this crisis, from a no more than discreet and limited aid. But Antonia had not known where to stop, and never had intervention proved more fatal. Instead of giving Lilia a sum down or arranging to make her a fixed allowance, she had ended by virtually adopting this girl of all but her own age. Endlessly was she to involve herself with the incurably negative destiny of this person; there she was, saddled with Lilia for what looked like always. Pushed off into a series of occupations, placed in vain in a series of gift shops, tea shops, brought in vain to the notice of likely friends, Lilia came bobbing back again like a thing on water. Blight had cut short her early beauty, apathy mildewed what might have remained, and her dependence upon Antonia more and more went with a profound mistrust. Still worse, Antonia’s unevenly-curbed dislike completed the demoralization Guy’s heady love then speedy death had begun. This had gone on till Lilia was nearly thirty; when Antonia, at her wits’ end, had decided to marry her off to Fred.
Fred was Guy’s and Antonia’s illegitimate cousin, byblow son of roving Montefort uncle. As to his mother, who vanished, little was known: it was generally held she’d had foreign blood, to which Fred’s colouring gave support. He had been left in at Montefort, not reclaimed and allowed to grow up in the stable yards, attempts to school him having been dropped in view of his usefulness round the place. At fifteen, mature for his age, he was said to be poaching salmon, going with women—if
he were
wild, it was wildness sheathed in stolidity. Few had encountered Fred: those who did so liked him—there had been, on the whole, regret when he cleared out. He walked out one morning without a word to anyone, to be heard of some time afterwards in Australia. The 1914 War saw him, one heard, at a battle-front with the
Australian army. Some years after that war, when Montefort was closed and the lands let out, Fred was reported about the country: Antonia tried to contact him but found him, again, gone.
His next return had been a matter of fate. Antonia, camping alone in Montefort, staring out of a window at the June twilight, saw him sauntering down the rise from the obelisk as though he had never been an hour away. She hastened out, shouting: Fred came back indoors with her and they drank together. No, this time—he informed her—he had no plans; he in fact would not be half sorry if someone said to him he was back for good. He had quite a mind to stay in the country if he could see his way to it, but he doubted that. She, on her side, was at a crisis of worry about the place—the fecklessness or ill-will of the grazing tenants, the decay getting a hold on the shut-up house. With a rush, on the strength of a brain-flash, she brought out the proposition about Montefort. He put down his glass and turned his head away slowly, as though offended: forbiddingly, he advised her to think it over. Would
he
think it over? Well, he supposed he might. He had then shoved past her out of the darkening dining-room. That night, as Antonia lay tense, excited, yet another comet shot through her brain: she could hardly wait to put up the idea to Fred. When next they met, in the yard next morning, she point-blank asked—had he got a wife? Fred’s eye for a moment just flitted over her—no, he told her, after deliberation. That was fine, she exulted: all could now be straightforward. For, let her tell him, a woman went with the land. Take one, take both: in fact, it was both or neither.
‘Would it be you?’ he not unreasonably asked.
On learning it was to be Lilia, whose legend he surprisingly did recall, he said he saw no harm in taking a look. Lilia, summoned by telegram, unknowingly brought herself over from England on approval. She arrived flaccid after the all-night journey, debilitated by sea-sickness, quite her worst—she had not been sleeping; morbid blue virginal circles were round her eyes; her talk was exclusively of fatigues and worries. Fred came in as far as doorways, where he lingered taking oblique notice: after thirty-six hours he was able to intimate that as far as
he
went, the thing was on. Would Antonia speak to the lady on his behalf?
Lilia, on being told she was asked in marriage, incontrovertibly answered that Fred was common. ‘You would not even ask me to
think of this,’ she added, ‘if it was not that you’re sick of the sight of me. So this is what it has come to! Have you forgotten how once I was good enough for Guy? It would have been better, I now see, if I had thrown myself off that ship on the way over. I all but did, let me tell you. When that telegram came, I knew you had something up your sleeve.’
‘To me, you know, Fred’s an attractive man.’
‘Then why don’t you have him?’
‘Because I don’t want him,’ flashed out Antonia thoughtlessly.
I see. So you put him up to this?’
‘But don’t you want a home?—my heavens! Don’t you ever want children? They’d be as pretty as posters: you wait and see!’
‘After all these years, you think of that.’
‘The occasion didn’t arise till now.’
‘You think so? Thank you,’ Lilia coldly returned. ‘How many other offers do you imagine I might not have always had, if I had chosen to lift a finger, instead of staying faithful to Guy’s memory? That, of course, you never would understand.’
That brought a clashing silence, a contemptuously brutal stare from Antonia under which Lilia folded up—she sobbed and began to pluck at her handkerchief. ‘Home where?’ she asked, with an air of shame. ‘What sort of home could he ever give me?’ She glanced round the crouching room with its smoky ceiling, then through the window at the void skyline. ‘Antonia, you and he can’t mean
here?
‘Where else?’
‘But this is a dreadful house.’
‘It was Guy’s. He loved it.’
‘He seldom spoke of it.’
‘Seldom to you, perhaps.’
‘I could never care for a place I could not keep nice.’
‘Once you’re married, you’ll find you’ll be twice the girl!’
An authentic shudder ran through Lilia’s frame. ‘I could never, now, embark upon all
that
!’
‘Rats! Try.’
‘Oh, you are sometimes terrible!’
‘Well, there you are,’ said Antonia. ‘Think it over—only don’t shillyshally; it wouldn’t be fair to Fred. By all means go back to the tea shop if you’d rather; but if you do, this time you must stick it out—or find something else for yourself. I shan’t be able to
prop you up any longer: the point has come when I won’t, so you’ll have to face it. I’m sick of having Montefort run to ruin; I’m going into this partnership with Fred; we’ll need all I have to patch up and stock the place. So you, I’m afraid, must be left to your own resources—which of course may be endless, for all I know!’
‘For all you care,’ Lilia said in a dead voice.
She had remained for three days stunned by the ultimatum, shocked by the outrage, mindless with indecision; while Fred, appearing only at meals, stole at her glances in which respect, pity and increasing desire were to be felt to merge. Aware of, slowly worked upon by those glances, she still refused to address Fred or meet his eyes. At last she capitulated; and, as Antonia could not now wait to be off to London, the wedding went through almost at once. Having escorted the couple home from the church, Antonia leaped back into the beribboned hackney and made her habitual dash to the boat train. She looked behind her once—they still stood framed in the doorway, blankly watching her go. They put no face on the thing.
It is not known what words Fred and Lilia then or in the following time exchanged. Left there to mate, they mated; but that is never all. Unleashed by marriage, his unforseen passion for her ran its unspeaking course, just outlasting the birth of their first child Jane. Antonia, returning to Montefort into the thick of that, was aghast. Though after all, she said to herself, why not? All the same, something monstrous seemed to her to be under her own roof. These two engendered a climate; the air around them felt to her sultry, overintensified, strange; one could barely breathe it. Yes, they had passed beyond her—she had made the match, they the marriage. For Lilia that was an epoch, not to occur again, of ascendancy over her former patron. She was again in beauty, of a lofty late lightless inert kind; her pregnancy added to and became her, and this great never quite smiling snow-woman, come into being almost overnight, was formidable. She neutrally and abstractedly eyed Antonia, heard her speak or spoke to her from a distance—she was queening it, and, which was still worse, queening it naturally, unawares. Smug, thought Antonia, cutting that visit short.
That, however, had been twenty years ago. When next Antonia came to Montefort Jane was an infant, and Fred’s kind, unfailing patience with Lilia confirmed the rumours that he was off again, back to his loves in the lanes. It was when Jane took form as herself that her father entered upon his first and last, devouring, hopeless and only love.