Adrian Glynde (28 page)

The old man sighed. Such dreams could come true only in an ideal state, when body and mind and law and convention had been finally shuffled off. And yet, though it was impossible to imagine the achievement of such a communion with the cool, crystalline heart of Clara, it seemed still to the old man that some small, simple key might even now unlock the deeply hidden, warm, ever bubbling spring which was the heart of the boy sitting opposite him.

Adrian returned to town on the following Tuesday in time for a Queen's Hall concert for which he had a ticket. He had arranged to dine out because the concert began at eight o'clock, and he only just had time to drive to Lennox Street and deposit his bag. Ronny was not in when he arrived there. He was glad that his evening was provided for. It would have been depressing, after the delightful sociability of Abbot's Randale, to arrive back and find that he had to spend the evening alone, or, worse still, with some of those friends of Ronny's whom he so much disliked. He did not mind going alone to a concert. While the music lasted he was always so much absorbed in it that he was unaware of his surroundings, and during the interval it was not unpleasant to smoke a cigarette in the corridor, leaning against the wall and watching the crowd.

On this occasion he reached his seat just as Beecham, who was conducting, came on to the platform; and as soon as he had settled himself the concert began. In his haste he had not noticed his neighbours on his right and left, and he was surprised, in the silence that followed the opening piece, to hear himself spoken to.

“And did you ever learn your toccata?” the voice said.

He turned his head and found, seated next him on his left, the black-eyed girl who had talked to him in the train two months ago. He had hardly thought of her during the interval, yet he found himself delighted
to meet her again. “Why, I never saw you when I came in,” he said, smiling and blushing.

“And I didn't see it was you,” she said, “till halfway through the overture. Are you alone?”

He told her that he was.

“So am I,” she said. “I often go to concerts alone. My mother isn't very strong and doesn't go out much, and other people, people one quite likes at other times, are often an awful bother at a concert.”

Adrian smiled. “I hope I shan't turn out to be a bother,” he said.

“Well, I can but give you a try,” she answered, with that amused look in her black eyes which he had noticed in the train.

He felt friendly and at ease with her. It was as if their acquaintanceship had ripened in absence.

“And how's the Royal College?” she enquired.

“It's very well indeed, thank you.”

“You're enjoying it?”

“Immensely.”

Their conversation was soon interrupted by the applause that greeted Beecham's return. The next piece was Handel's Water Music, and the music itself and the tender, lyrical beauty of Beecham's rendering of it entranced Adrian. It seemed to him the most lovely music in the world. When the interval came they went out together. As he followed her up the stepped gangway he noticed the simple faultlessness of her white cloak with its ermine collar. She leaned against the wall of the corridor and he stood facing her, smoking a cigarette. Her small, square face, her black hair and black eyes, looked even more charming without a hat.

“I'm very glad we met,” he said.

“So am I,” she answered frankly, “and I'm glad,
too, that you're glad, because you weren't a bit pleased, you know, last time I ventured to speak to you.” Her black eyes danced.

“In the train, you mean?” said Adrian.

“Yes. You scowled fearfully and looked extremely bored.”

“I thought you were laughing at me.”

“And so I was.”

“Why? Is there any harm in reading music in the train?”

“You were so terribly serious, and your scowls amused me. I'm not used to being scowled at.”

Adrian laughed. “Well, you know, I … I … thought you …”

“Thought me what? “Her smiled enboldened him.

“Well, rather an impertinent young person.”

She broke into a laugh. “And so I suppose I was, by the most correct standards.”

“But I'm doing my best to forgive you now,” said Adrian.

What a nice child he was, she thought to herself, as he stood before her with his unconscious, boyish grace. She was amused and attracted by the quiet earnestness with which he spoke, even when his words were frivolous. And how frank and friendly he was: he treated her, she thought, just as he would treat a boy or a man. That she was an attractive young woman did not seem to occur to him, and she found that refreshing and, somehow, flattering. He was looking at his programme now, and next moment he glanced up from it impulsively. “I say,” he said, “I hadn't heard about this.”

He handed her the programme, pointing to a concert advertised for the following week. “Are you going to it?” he asked when she had run through the programme.

“Most certainly I am,” she replied, “if there are any tickets left.”

“Then you haven't got a ticket?”

“No.”

“Shall I get you one when I get mine?”

“Please do,” she said. “That will be very kind of you. Then you'll let me know if you manage to get them?”

“Yes,” said Adrian as if the matter were settled.

She paused, smiling, and then said: “You won't by any chance want my address or telephone number, or perhaps even my name?”

“Your name?” He was astonished to discover that he didn't know her name, “and of course you don't know mine either,” he said. “How extraordinary!”

She laughed. “Is it so extraordinary?”

“It seems so to me,” said Adrian simply.

He returned on foot to Lennox Street. To sit still in a bus or tube would have been unendurable. Only by strenuous bodily movement could he ease the intense happiness that glowed in him, suffused his body and limbs, flooded his heart with warm light. He strode forward, but his thoughts and feelings streamed back ecstatically to the evening behind him. Her face, her laughing black eyes, her exquisite white, silky dress and cloak kept swimming up into his memory. Lucy Wendover. An enchanting name. He laughed happily to himself. What a state of excitement he was in. Was he in love with her, then? Evidently that was what was up with him. How astonishing. How amusing. How profoundly enthralling. He fumbled mechanically for his latchkey and opened the door. As he rounded the turn in the stairs he saw, from a long crack of light under
the door, that the sitting-room was occupied. Were some of those wretched people there? Well, he didn't mind if they were, damn them. He opened the door and went in.

Ronny was alone, sprawling on the sofa with a pipe and a book. He raised his eyes to Adrian and gave a long yawn; and Adrian stood for a moment looking at him as if from a great distance. He had completely forgotten Ronny during the last three hours, and now, as he stood there, it was as if he were rediscovering him. At the same time he was discovering himself, his new self which told him that he was independent of Ronny. Independent and even slightly hostile, stirred by an impulse to exhibit his freedom by slighting him. For a moment he felt like obeying the impulse. “Hallo,” he might say, “you're in. Well, I'm sleepy and I'm off to bed. Good night.” That would be to repeat the act of his first meeting with Ronny in that room, but with the parts reversed.

But Ronny was already speaking. “Hallo, Little Man, so you're back. Lord, but you do look well.”

“So I am,” he answered, laughing to himself in the knowledge of his rapturous secret. He threw his coat and hat on a chair, walked to the mantelpiece, and, lighting a cigarette, stood with his back to the fire looking down on Ronny, who still sprawled on the sofa.

Ronny inspected him, as they talked, with puzzled curiosity. What had come over him? He had never seen him so forthcoming, so surprisingly full of beans. Adrian went to the sideboard and got an apple. He devoured it, then got another and devoured that.

“Didn't you have any dinner?” Ronny enquired.

Adrian seemed surprised at the question. “Dinner? Yes, an excellent dinner, thanks.”

They talked for a few minutes more, and then Adrian
declared he must go to bed. Hitherto he had always been glad to sit up for as long as Ronny was willing to do so. This unaccustomed Adrian was really rather extraordinary, rather unorthodox, but it was not Ronny's habit to ponder and draw conclusions. He went to bed and forgot the incident, and as Adrian appeared much as usual at breakfast next morning, he had no reason to recall it.

Next day Adrian succeeded in getting the tickets for the concert, and at once rang up Lucy Wendover to tell her so. As he waited for her with the receiver in his hand he was inspired by the bold idea of asking her to dine before the concert; but when her voice came, so clear and precise and disappointingly matter-of-fact, his courage was damped, and he acquiesced when she said that they would meet in their places. Hadn't she sounded rather cold, he wondered as he left the telephone-box. What had he said to put her off? He did not realise that he had imagined a coldness in her voice merely because its effect had not been reinforced by her lively presence and those mischievous, dancing eyes of hers; nor could he take into account the fact that she knew nothing of his feelings for her.

But when they met at the concert a few days later he found no trace of coldness in her. That evening was for him even more entrancing than the first, and when they parted she invited him to dine with her and her mother two days later. The invitation greatly reassured him. He saw in it, poor infatuated boy, much more than there was any warrant for seeing. It did not occur to him that Lucy's mother might have insisted on inspecting and approving the stray young man with whom her daughter had made friends, or that they might both wish
merely to establish an acquaintance with him, might have been tempted to do so by his relationship to the famous Oliver Glynde. Whether these things were so or not, Adrian left them out of account. Lucy had invited him, he believed, because she felt for him not, he humbly told himself, what he felt for her—how could she? but something at least, he vaguely hoped, more than mere friendliness; and therefore she had wanted to introduce him to her mother, to draw him into the family circle. These omens added to his already overflowing happiness.

He was received by a slightly subdued, slightly less mischievous Lucy, who introduced him to a small, frail grey-haired woman with the delicate, fragile face and hands of an invalid and, unexpectedly, a quiet assurance of speech. She received Adrian with a charming friendliness which won his heart at the outset. Her quietness, her dignity, and her kindness seemed to him to make Lucy more real and more secure for him. He played to them after dinner and went home dangerously encouraged, his heart warmed by Mrs. Wendover's pressing him to come again.

“Well, Mother,” said Lucy when he had gone; “has he passed?”

Mrs. Wendover smiled. “Oh, certainly he has,” she said. “He's a dear boy. But don't let him fall in love with you. He's far too young.”

“Oh, far too young,” Lucy agreed. “But, thank goodness, he's too wrapped up in his music to fall in love. That's what makes him so awfully nice. He talks to me as if I were one of his boy friends. And he's extraordinarily interesting about music: to go to a concert with him is a revelation. I feel as if I were discovering music for the first time.”

“He certainly plays exquisitely,” said Mrs. Wendover; “such breadth, and his tone is quite superb.”

Week followed week, and they met often, dining or lunching and going to concerts together—delightful occasions only a little dimmed for Adrian by Lucy's unshakable insistence that she should pay her share for tickets and meals, and by her way of sometimes, as if suddenly detaching herself from him, treating him with a kind of maternal patronage. For Lucy, those moments, at which she felt herself so much older than him, were moments of expansive affection, but they mortified Adrian. He, on the contrary, felt that she was thrusting him from her. For him they reflected Ronny's attitude, implied in his nickname of Little Man, a nickname which had once warmed his heart, but which nowadays often shamed and irritated him. But they were small matters—those little checks on his happiness in Lucy. Adrian at this time was in that state of supreme well-being in which life breaks into a new and marvellous blossoming. He awoke each morning radiantly happy, he went about his work and pleasures with that abundant zest which devours all that is set before it and cries out for more and he went to bed aglow with health and happiness.

To Ronny he told almost nothing. Ronny had soon noticed his increased absences from Lennox Street, and had concluded that he was avoiding the society of Esmé and the rest. One evening when Adrian returned home late he had taunted him on the subject. “Hallo, Little Man,” he had said as Adrian entered the sitting-room; “running away from the girls again?”

Adrian was puzzled, and, when Ronny had explained, was stung into replying: “As it happens, I was spending the evening with one.”

Ronny laughed. “You, Little Man? Don't tell
me
.”

Adrian was annoyed by Ronny's persistent assumption. “My dear Ronny,” he said, with a touch of haughtiness, “you can't expect, even with your well-known charm, to monopolise the whole female population.”

Ronny in turn was somewhat nettled. “Well, I must say, you
are
coming on,” he remarked patronisingly, and then added with a return to his usual good-humour: “Anyhow, I hope it was a pleasant evening.”

“Very pleasant, thanks,” said Adrian, amiable but totally uncommunicative. He felt very definitely that he did not want Ronny to know about Lucy. In his new independence he had, at times, a curious feeling of resentment towards Ronny, and he was not going to share his wonderful secret with him. Not likely.