Adrian Glynde (30 page)

“Not much use? What do you mean?” said Adrian.

“Well, as company in the evening, for instance.”

“But you're so seldom free,” said Adrian. “When I used to dine in, I did so alone more often than not.”

“Still, I
am
here sometimes, you know.”

“I know, but you never could tell me when. Often when I expected you, you failed at the last minute, didn't you? I'm not complaining,” he went on. “All I mean to say is that you can't expect me, and I'm sure you don't, to stay in night after night on the vague chance.”

That, in point of fact, was what Ronny did expect, but he would not have admitted it even to himself, nor did Adrian appreciate the fact that by his former subservience he had given Ronny grounds to expect it. He was too occupied with Lucy and his new life to perceive these things. Ronny answered him now with a rather unconvincing disclaimer. He had a clear enough sense of fair play to see that he had no right to demand that Adrian should refuse invitations and run the risk of solitary evenings in the precarious hope of his company, but he saw too that Adrian had once been content to do this and now was not. Even the most benevolent of gods does not welcome the loss of a worshipper. The Little Man was ceasing to be the faithful little man that he had once been. He was growing up; in fact, he had already grown up, and all in the last few months.

Occasionally, with a slight tinge of scepticism in his voice, Ronny enquired after Adrian's mysterious girl. More than once, in the hope of provoking him to divulge something more explicit, he went so far as to express a doubt of her existence. But all to no purpose. Adrian remained uncommunicative; and though Ronny did not persist, this reticence, so far from fending him off, only roused his curiosity, and not only his curiosity, but also a secret resentment. But Lucy remained a myth. Adrian never brought her round to Lennox Street when Ronny was likely to be there, although twice he had taken her there at other times to give her a book or some music which she wanted to borrow.

It was not till September that by accident Lucy and Ronny met. Finding herself near Lennox Street late one afternoon, it occurred to her to call for a book which Adrian had promised to lend her. The maid thought that Adrian was in and showed her up to the sitting-room, where she found Ronny alone.

She had stayed only a few minutes. Ronny had found the book for her, and she had refused, though he had used all his charm to persuade her, to wait till Adrian came in. When she had gone, Ronny lit a pipe, chuckling to himself. It seemed to him a gorgeous joke that he should by this happy accident have unearthed the Little Man's jealously guarded secret. So this was what had drawn him out of his old self. Well, she was an attractive girl and no mistake. There was something about her … What was it? It
was
not that she was shy: she was as self-possessed as Nancy or Gill, even as Esmé. But she was somehow much more of a young woman, much more vivid and warmly human than they. They had the hardness and friendly brutality of men. In her he felt the
presence of mysteries and hidden tenderness. She was alive, while they, in a way, were dead. What sort of terms were she and Adrian on, he wondered? Adrian had never before shown the least interest in girls. Ronny flattered himself that he was a bit of a Sherlock Holmes, and he remembered now, as a significant fact, that the book she had come for was a book about some musician. Ah, that little fact gave the show away. Ronny laughed to himself with a touch of scorn. That would be just like the Little Man, to pick up a really lovely young creature like this for the simple reason that she was musical, that she was a good person to talk to about music. That explanation pleased him because it put Adrian back in his appropriate immaturity and explained away, without diminishing his own importance, Adrian's apparent defection. But, in any case, this accidental exposure of the Little Man's secret was a gorgeous joke, and when, a quarter of an hour later, Adrian came in, Ronny broke out at once.

“Well, the game's up, Little Man.” He smiled broadly at Adrian. “I've just had such a jolly chat with Miss Wendover.”

“She called here?” said Adrian. “Didn't she leave a message?” But what had happened to the Little Man's face? Ronny had watched him and had seen his expression change suddenly. For a moment it was as if he had received some terrible news, but almost at once he had controlled himself and both face and voice were being forced to disguise his feelings. What those feelings were Ronny could not make out. Was it just one of the Little Man's unaccountable fits of shyness? What a funny devil he was. But then, he always had been. He had always been one for sudden, secret feelings, the causes of which remained a mystery. But Ronny's heavy-handed jocularity dissolved before Adrian's strange behaviour
and, seeing that the subject troubled him, he abandoned it. For an empty, suspended moment there was silence. Then Adrian, in a voice which had almost recovered its normal tone, said: “I'll just go and have a wash,” and went out of the room.

What Adrian feared he could not exactly have said, but for the next two days, until the evening when he was to see Lucy again, he lived in a state of apprehension. A gnawing anxiety pursued him wherever he went. He felt as if Lucy were ill, as if his hold on her had suddenly become insecure, and he longed for the reassurance of the moment of their meeting again. It was in vain that he tried to argue himself out of his fears. What, after all, he asked himself, had happened? Nothing. Lucy had met Ronny and spoken a few words to him: nothing more. Was his fear, then, simple jealousy? Yes, there was jealousy in it, but that was not all. He felt vaguely that something sinister in Ronny, something which he had never defined but had perceived still more strongly in Nancy and Gill and Esmé and Billy, was threatening that warm innocence which was so unspeakably precious to him in Lucy. But he could not analyse his fears, and though his reason told him they were groundless, they persisted, sapping his peace of mind. Time slowed down till it had almost ceased to move, and he could hardly bear to wait for the hour of their meeting.

He arrived early at the restaurant where they were to meet, and as he sat waiting it seemed to him incredible that fate would really allow her to come. He watched the door, sick with doubt, and when, punctual as usual, she came, his relief almost overwhelmed him. How amazed Lucy would have been if she had known all that
had happened to him since they last met, the tides of feeling that had swept him, the torrent of relief that, at her coming, had almost cut his feet from under him as he rose to greet her; for nothing was apparent in him except a trace of awkwardness, a little more restraint than was now usual with him, and, throughout the evening, less talkativeness than before.

These signs were so many assurances to her of Adrian's safety. Once or twice lately she had had misgivings. A sudden flushing of his face when they met, the trace of a tremor in his voice, something unexpected and, as she thought, unlike him in his eyes as he leaned towards her across the restaurant table, had made her wonder for a moment whether his friendship was growing into something more than friendship. But in the end she had always put these things down either to his shyness or his boyish frankness. Perhaps her own wishes had made her unnaturally blind, for what she especially liked and valued in him was that he did not make love to her, did not treat her as a creature to be carefully stalked, but as an intelligent being and an equal. His behaviour tonight strengthened her confidence. She could not have divined that he was silent because his heart was too full to talk, because he was content, in the blissful release from his anxiety, to sit in her presence and drink in the rapture it brought him.

He desired now only one final reassurance, that she should tell him of her meeting with Ronny. But the evening wore on, they left the restaurant and made their way to the Wigmore Hall, the concert began, the interval came, and still she said nothing of her call at Lennox Street. Her silence roused once more his lulled anxieties. He felt them grow up in him like a crop of weeds, spreading, flowering, scattering a shower of small poisonous fruit. At last, as the interval drew to a close, he turned
to her and, fixing his eyes on her face, said:“I'm glad you got the book all right.”

Perhaps it was the intentness of his gaze that made her colour rise, but he was sure that there was a constraint in her voice when she replied.

“Yes,” she said, “I called, as I expect you heard.” She hesitated, and then added: “I thought I should find you in.”

That was all. And yet, he argued miserably with himself in bed that night, wouldn't it have been the natural thing for her to have mentioned Ronny, even to have done so when they first met without his having to raise the subject of the book later and give her the chance? Wasn't her reticence an ominous symptom? What was she keeping back from him? What had they said when they met? What did she think of Ronny? She had thought too much, of course, to trust herself to speak of him. A black wave of despair rose, yawned, and burst over him. “Lucy!” his heart cried out to her desperately in the darkness.

Then his mind set to work again. And what of Ronny? The thought of Ronny brought him some comfort, for Ronny had had no reticences; he had cheerfully blurted the whole thing out at once. That surely showed that he, at least, had nothing to hide. Besides, Ronny was a thorough sportsman: he would never go to work behind his back to entice Lucy away from him. No; but Ronny enticed whether he meant to or not. However right his intentions might be, his charm might capture Lucy, might have captured her already. At the thought of losing her, her image, heart-rendingly clear, heart-rendingly precious to him, swam up into his consciousness. It was too terrible to be true that he was going to lose her. And then, in reaction against the monstrosity of the thought, he assured himself once again that
nothing had really happened at all, that the whole thing was a figment of his imagination. Once one allowed one's imagination to start working there was nothing it wouldn't invent. And it was always worse at night: he knew that. When he awoke to-morrow morning he would find that the whole thing was a feverish nightmare. His mind, torturing him with alternate terrors and reassurances, at last exhausted its ingenuity, and as a distant clock struck three he fell asleep.

The long drawing-room was cleared for dancing. Against the background of green-panelled walls the coloured shapes of dancing couples glided and revolved to the hot pulse of the music. Others sat and talked on chairs and sofas pushed back against the wainscot. The music stopped, the rhythmic movements of the dancers broke off into slow confusion and Ronny's hostess took possession of him. “Come with me, Mr. Dakyn,” she said. “I want to introduce you to a very charming young friend of mine.”

He followed her, and in a moment found himself being introduced to Lucy Wendover. Finding that they were already acquainted, their hostess left them. “I thought it too bad that those two beautiful young creatures weren't dancing together,” she whispered to a friend who stood near.

Ronny and Lucy agreed to sit out. “It's funny, isn't it, that we should meet by accident again,” he said. Lucy, for one of the rare occasions of her life, felt shy. Under the gaze of those lively, bright blue eyes of his, her usual self-possession deserted her and it was he, at first, who did most of the talking. He was in high spirits. In the presence of this beautiful girl, whose admiration he detected in her shyness, his charm of manner and appearance displayed itself at its brightest. He was amused, too, at this new defeat of Adrian's secretiveness. It was another joke on the Little Man: he would rag him about it when he got home. But there was something more than amusement in it: there was also, though so deeply
hidden that he himself did not consciously perceive it, a gratified sense of revenge taken on Adrian's defection. Adrian had deserted him and had jealously guarded his supplanter from him, and now he and the supplanter were making friends on their own account.

They found a sofa in an anteroom. But if Lucy was here, it suddenly occurred to him, Adrian must be here too. It would be a better joke still if Adrian were to come into the anteroom now and find them talking. “I haven't seen Adrian,” he said to Lucy, “but I suppose he's here.”

Lucy looked quickly about the room. “Adrian? I didn't know he was. I thought he didn't care for dancing.”

“Oh, if you don't know he's here, he won't be. I just took it for granted, because
you
are.”

Lucy laughed. “Then you imagine that …?” She hesitated over how to put it.

“Yes, that' everywhere that Mary went the lamb was sure to go,' “said Ronny.

Lucy resented the assumption. “Oh, dear me, no,” she said. “We have lunch or dinner together sometimes and go to concerts, but we're not
quite
inseparable.” Then, ashamed of the impulse to disown her friendship with Adrian, she added: “But I do like him. He's a charming child and we're very good friends.”

Ronny laughed. “Yes, he is, isn't he? I keep forgetting he isn't still a little boy at school. At school, you see, he was very much younger than me. He used to be my fag.”

“Was he very fond of music at school?”

“Rather,” said Ronny. “Wrapped up in it, as he is now. Not that he wasn't good at games too, especially footer. I suppose he
is
pretty good at music?”

“Oh, very good indeed,” said Lucy enthusiastically.

“And you're keen on music too?”

“Yes,” she said. “And so, you see, Adrian and I forgather over music. But he knows much more about it than I do. I used to work at it when I was his age, but I wasn't good enough. I gave up working at it seriously some years ago.”

Lucy had lost some of her shyness now, but she still avoided his eyes. Through the screen of their talk she was acutely aware of his presence, his body leaning towards her, his gaze enveloping her; and when occasionally she ventured a fleeting glance at him she saw that, sure enough, his gay, blue eyes were fixed upon her as he talked. She had never been so immediately, so overpoweringly aware of anyone before. It was not his words nor his personality that were impressing themselves upon her so violently. It was his vivid, dazzling bodily presence which, it seemed, reached out beyond its tangible confines and enclosed her, entangled her in a net. She felt she must get up and go away, outside his influence; or else lean back, close her eyes, and happily abandon herself to it.