Authors: Elizabeth Bowen
This insane London spree for Lilia, what would it cost?
She’ll
soon find her way round Derry and Toms. Paying up, I keep on, fumed Antonia. My fault, not having called her bluff at the start. Start—when had it started? Bluff, had it been, really, ever? Haystack, yes; but the needle was in it somewhere. She and I knew the truth—Guy
did
love her, like it or not. So why go back over that?
He came back, through Jane, to be let go. It was high time.
When that clock struck, it said: ‘Enough!’
But that being so, thought Antonia, we shall hardly know each other. For what now? She slid down in bed, drawing the cape with her for extra cover. The future was now the bore; which was to say, the future was now the thing—it could do it no harm, however, to be left in abeyance a short time longer; till Jane, for instance, was back from Shannon. Who knew what might not decide itself? Or, as against that, nothing at all might happen, which would be a kind of decision too. The day itself might do no more than look more and more like rain—indeed, the air by assuming a false tense glint was turning the grass livid with thwarted longing; and so, considered Antonia (herself now desiring nothing) it would do it no harm to stay. Remembering that on Jane’s account (and Maud’s also, it now seemed) the dinner-hour had been put forward, she thought she should soon probably get up: her sense of reprieve as to all else made the prospect less trying than usual.
Three barometers hung in different parts of the hall; Jane idly passed from one to another, tapping. ‘When,’ she asked as Antonia came downstairs, ‘did any of these last go, I wonder?’
‘Not in my time, I fancy. We never looked at them.’
‘This
one possibly could be—or could it? It says “Fair”—but then you’ve got rheumatism, haven’t you?’ said the girl reproachfully.
‘No, not, after all. And anyway rain doesn’t stop flying.’
‘No, but it’s not so nice. And think of arriving!’
‘By the way, why’s he arriving if he’s cast-off?’
‘Oh dear—how do you know?’
‘You and your mother were simply shouting.’
‘The awful thing’, said Jane, in a burst of confidence, ‘is, that he doesn’t know. He wasn’t cast off in time to stop him. And
I
don’t even know where he’s coming from: I suppose Harris does.’
‘Harris should have the flight number.’
Jane leaned her shoulder against the distempered wall, beside the hopeful barometer, which hung on the other side of the clock from Guy’s photograph. ‘I seem,’ she said anxiously and despondently, ‘to have started saying such awful things.’
‘That wall will come off on to your blazer!’
Jane moved, gave the shoulder a backward brush, but went on: ‘Like saying I’d been seduced. That was only Peregrine.’
‘Today you’re taking a bodyguard?’
‘Nothing more’s been actually said, but…’
‘Like me to try a word with your mother?’
‘Oh no, no—no, I don’t want some awful fuss. And after all’—Jane gave a baffled sigh—’why should I care? What does it matter?’
The van was with them when least expected. One moment not there, the next it was, with an air of having been there always. It took part in the landscape, filling the foreground. Maud was the first to issue from the house; Harris touched his cap but so far said nothing. The child prowled round the vehicle, looking at and into it at all angles: the seating inside reminded her of a small church.
‘You could put a horse in this,’ she said, ‘if necessary.’
‘Well, it isn’t normally used for that, miss.’
Lilia, next upon the scene, turned a warning though weak look upon Maud before saying: ‘Good afternoon, Harris.’ The entire ambience of their meeting was different this time—for one thing, she knew his name. ‘Do you think,’ she asked, ‘it’s going to rain?’
‘I could not say, madam,’ he replied, in his English voice of utter authority. ‘Might hold off. Still, it’s a change since yesterday.’
Lilia agreed. She went on to say: ‘I’m afraid my daughter’s not quite ready. She can’t find something.’
‘We’re ahead of time, by a bit,’ said Harris, untroubled. He turned in the other direction his hinged head. ‘Quite an interesting monument you’ve got there. Caught my attention the other evening.’ Fred having opportunely appeared, Lilia was able to say to him: ‘Harris has been admiring the obelisk.’ She linked her arm maritally through Fred’s. ‘I wish I could remember its origin—surely it must have had one, didn’t it, Fred?’
‘Chap put it up in memory of himself,’ said he, with a glance at the thing, for the first time struck by it.
‘What, while he was still alive?’ marvelled Lilia. ‘Rather peculiar, surely? What was his name?’
‘Couldn’t tell you.’
‘Oh, then he
is
forgotten!’
During the pause, Antonia joined the group, was asked, looked bored and supplied the name. She carried her cup and was drinking coffee. ‘Married the cook,’ she went on, ‘went queer in the head from drinking and thinking about himself, left no children—anyway, no legits. So this place went to his first cousin.—Where on earth’s Jane? Hurry her up.’
‘Harris,’ said Lilia, ‘says there’s plenty of time.’
‘Well, there’s
time,
madam.’
Fred, disengaging himself from Lilia for this purpose, was to be the next to walk round the van: this he did in a sceptical although still open-minded manner, looking underneath it, which had not been done before. Finally saying to Harris, ‘Mind if I do?’ he flung open the bonnet. ‘Hmmm,’ he remarked, standing back, ‘how d’you find her?’
‘So-so,’ said Harris, and cleared his throat. He was looking away again, this time not at the obelisk but at the rise on which it stood, and something in the nature of his attention made each blade and leaf upon the incline stand out stereoscopically sharply. When Harris said, ‘Clover, I shouldn’t wonder?’ the others heard him without surprise. ‘Mind if I look?—I could do with a bit of luck.’ Speaking, he swung himself from the van and, concentrated, set off upon his quest—except for his chauffeur’s cap he was not in uniform but wore a sort of a compromise get-up, dark coat, groom’s breeches. He struck, in fact, a note that went with the van; and this, with the milieu in which he found himself, accounted no doubt for the jauntiness, the foreboding and distant egalitarianism of his manner, which was at no point ever not correct, for he would not so far yield to them as to have it otherwise. All watched. He proceeded unerringly to a point some three foot from the base of the monument, stopped, stooped, plucked, straightened his back again. ‘My God,’ said Antonia, ‘he’s found one!’
Harris started back to them, twirling the four-leaved clover. Slowing down on his way, he with care began working the weak stalk into his button-hole. Maud had meanwhile seized the occasion to settle herself on the van’s front seat: she had with her her plastic raincoat, in whose pocket could be seen to be folded the pixie hood, and less visibly was accompanied by Gay David. She looked patronizingly at her family through the windscreen. Harris, reoccupying the driver’s place, said: ‘Well, look who’s here,’ without enthusiasm.
‘I wondered,’ said Lilia, hastening up, ‘whether you or her ladyship would object if my little girl were to go with you? She’s never seen an aeroplane.’
‘Yes I
have,’
said Maud, perfectly furious.
Harris said: ‘Well, I couldn’t speak for her ladyship.’
Jane in white, blazer over her arm, appeared in the door of
Montefort saying: ‘Father?’ at which Fred half-comprehendingly turned. The girl said: ‘Only, I’m off. Goodbye,’ and, ducking her head, made a blind bridal rush past him into the van. Harris reached forward to touch the starter.
But Jane immediately cried: ‘Wait!’—she wound down a window and leaned out, abashed but saying ‘Antonia…’ in a low urgent summoning tone which brought the other alongside, fretted by more of this in the sunless glare. And Jane, as though all of Antonia’s faculties must somewhere be in the dark of those twin pools, spoke directly into the sunglasses— ‘I
do
know who they were to,’ she said very hurriedly. ‘Shall I tell you?’
‘What have you been doing?’
‘Burning them.’
‘What, with this at the door?’ asked Antonia, kicking a tyre of the van. ‘And, what do you mean? They were burned last night.’
‘No; Kathie got frightened. She found a name in them.’
‘Oh?’ said Antonia.
Jane gave the unknown name, naturally adding: ‘So who was she?’
‘I don’t believe I remember,’ said Antonia. She stepped back, saying: ‘You’d better start,’ with a nod at Harris. The van moved. The girl’s last cry as she fell away from the window, against Maud, was: ‘Anyway, that
was
who it was. So tell mother!’
‘What?’ asked Lilia. ‘What is it? What has Jane been doing?’
The van, turning, was out of earshot—Antonia whether idly or madly said: ‘Burning those letters from Guy to you.’
Lilia said, by reflex: ‘She should have asked me.’ Her hand climbed fumblingly to her throat. ‘Sure, are you—
sure
that was what she said?’
Antonia, faced by the ancient face of youth, had not the heart to turn back. ‘Yes,’ she said.
With a dazed last sob Lilia ran back to Fred. Though he never would be Guy, never quite the same.
Watching the van drive away, bearing the children, the three stood—Antonia outside the fence, Fred and Lilia framed in the doorway. This was an echo, a second time—second time of what? Wedding afternoon. All was repeated almost exactly—summer emptiness darkening along the edges, hypnotic sky. Yes, and today could, if one wished, be counted an anniversary; for the
Danby wedding had been, had it not, on much such a day as this was, near the end of a June. Left behind in that doorway the pair had stood, watching Antonia drive away in their wedding taxi, free of them. Those two she had forced to their bridal doom; she had left them to it, and to what? But the fact was, there had been no going away; one is never quite quit of what one has done. What had they done to her?—they had sucked her back. Nor, as Fred said, had she been as clever as she thought: her decree, her overweeningness, her apparent will had done no more than implement waiting nature—they were to marry, whether or not. There had been compulsion, yes; but she was subject no less than they: Guy’s death, even, had been contributory to Jane’s birth. And so, what was Jane for? Beautiful, yes; but why?
The two in the door, watching the van drive off, had resumed that air they wore on their wedding day, that air of having been thrown together. It was the former look, which it had taken Antonia twenty-one years to fathom, not so much of misgiving as of subservience. What might be the acquaintanceship of their bodies seemed by this moment to be dissolved to nothing; for there, being carried away in the van, went all there had been to show for it: Jane, Maud. Antonia wondered what thought, if indeed, any, at this moment was in their joint mind—she would never know. Sh
chad
never known them—that it, so far as thought goes. But she had felt them; she felt them now. She had pictured and was now picturing them—one does not need absence to do that. And indeed perhaps, she thought, much of our own significance is unknown to us, being given to us by others in awe or pity, and so part of a picture we cannot see. She had a significance for them; that was to say, in general—but not now. She knew them well enough to know that.
‘Which of the girls do you think will open the gate?’
‘Harris will nip out,’ Fred told Lilia.
—The letters, how had they come into the house? Sent back to Guy, why? A breaking-off, a reproach, a revengeful act? Or had she died, leaving somebody else to take speaking action? Had they returned here among Guy’s things after Guy’s death? Or had he, alive, on one of his leaves here, wandering with the husks of them in his hand, seeking their right grave, bitterly or poetically buried them in the ceraments of some other expired summer, the muslin of the dress? Or hoarded them, with their charge of love, against such a winter as for all he knew he might have to live to see? Then, why not her letters, why his own? Better recall how it felt to love; to have been loved means a little less. Nor had they been buried, but lightly hidden—hidden to be found. Found as they might be found by a seeking girl on an idle evening.
Or, after he had been killed, while Montefort more or less stood empty, had there unknown been a comer to the place, letters in her hand? No knowing what anybody will do—such as make a journey simply to set eyes upon an obelisk, a bit of river, a rock looking into a pool as it did in letters; to see, by seeing these in reality, that so far at least as
these
went he had been true with her; or to behold them simply for his sake? Pleading or buying her way into his house, looking into his rooms, out of his windows—what was to stop her? Stacked in the attics, to wait for ever, she would find his familiar things which, having come home without him, unbearably said: ‘So this is the end.’ So from that she fled—thrusting the letters under the lid of a trunk to lie stifled there with a muslin woman; for as she would have heard there had been Lilia… Nothing so foolish could be impossible: wherever one looks twice, there is some mystery. However the letters had come into the house, they were now gone.