Faster! Faster! (14 page)

The only woman whom he had ever really admired was his wife, and after ten years he was still intensely grateful to her for having married him and for never reproaching him that he had been unable to give her a child.

The Zienszis gave and received greetings, and the whole party sat on rugs beneath the giant willow-trees.

Anna was delighted to meet Frances Ladislaw again. She sat next her and poured forth eager questions and answers.

However much she might have succeeded in altering her appearance, Frances felt that fundamentally the young Anna was still there, unchanged but matured.

I don't get the same feeling with Claudia, she thought dimly. Why is it she's so competent, so brave and splendid and hard-working, and yet at
the same time gives one an impression of—what is it—instability?

Remembering her conversation with Claudia on the evening of her arrival at Arling, she wondered about the relationship between the sisters. They seemed sufficiently at ease together, and there was no doubt of Anna's interest in, and affection for, the children.

“How's His Lordship?” she tactfully enquired of Taffy.

“Feeling the heat, poor old gentleman. It's such a pity he can't go for a nice swim and get cool.”

“Are we going to swim this afternoon?” said Anna delightedly. “I've brought my things.”

“Oh, I bet you've got some marvellous new swim-suit!”

“I have, rather,” Anna admitted. “I've been dying for an opportunity to show it off.”

“We'll take you down to the sea after lunch,” Maurice volunteered. “Will you be able to come, Mother?”

“Oh yes. We'll all go.”

“If it isn't too hot for you,” Adolf Zienszi remarked to his brother-in-law, “I was hoping you might give me a little exercise on the tennis-court this afternoon. This is the kind of weather I can enjoy.”

Thin and spare to the point of leanness, and keeping as he did to a rigid diet, it was nevertheless the fear of Adolf's life that he might one day grow stout.

He seized avidly upon every opportunity for taking strenuous exercise.

Copper, with limited enthusiasm, promised him a game.

“I'll play too,” said Sylvia suddenly. “Let's have a set, unless you and Daddy frightfully want to play singles.”

“Not in the least,” said Copper. “Who's your fourth? Quarrendon?”

“I'm told that I resemble a cathedral walking when I play tennis,” said Quarrendon with a glance at Taffy, “but I'm willing to provide the spectacle. My play, I ought perhaps to add, is very much what you'd expect from the description.”

The conversation continued, pleasantly trivial and discursive.

Suddenly, as it seemed to Frances, they were in the midst of a psychic disturbance.

It was afternoon. The set of tennis, which had begun late, was still in progress; Mrs Peel, watching it, had fallen asleep; Taffy and Maurice—their bathe unaccountably deferred by their mother until some unspecified later hour—were entertaining themselves and faintly disturbing others with a variety concert of Hot Numbers from Luxembourg, and their mother and aunt, with Sal Oliver and Frances, sat in the shade and talked.

It was Anna who plunged, with cyclonic abruptness, from detached, aimless chat into more vital topics.

“Claudia, what about my plan for Taffy? May I have her?”

“Have her?” echoed Claudia blankly.

“Take her with us, either this year or next, to the States, and send her to Bryn Mawr. She says she's taking School Certificate next term. Of course there's no immediate hurry, but I'd like to fix things up in good time. Then the College authorities can put her name down for admission next year.”

“What a piece of luck for Taffy!” said Sal Oliver coolly.

The atmosphere seemed suddenly to have become electric. Frances glanced, almost surreptitiously, at Claudia. Was it fancy, or had she become rather paler? She was intent on measuring two blades of grass one against the other.

At last she looked up and spoke very quietly.

“You're an angel, Anna dear, to think of it, but honestly—I don't know what to say. Taffy's only sixteen. I suppose you wouldn't like to transfer the offer to Sylvia?” She laughed as she spoke, so that none could tell whether she was in earnest or not.

“I'm afraid not,” Anna said. “Sylvia is a darling, and gets prettier every time I see her—(that girl's too wonderful, she's
always
prettier than one expects her to be)—but I think Taffy suits Adolf better. Besides, she's wild to come.”

“She'd be most unnatural if she wasn't,” observed Sal briskly. “And I quite agree that she's the one that ought to go. It's none of it my business, Claudia, I know, but you know what I think about Taffy.”

“Quite well, Sal dear. So well that I don't think
we need go into it just now. Anna, may I think it over?”

“Well,” said Anna, “I don't believe that means anything at all, unless it's a civil way of refusing. So if you don't mind, why not let's discuss it here and now? Frances is your greatest friend—and one of my oldest ones—and Sal here knows all about all of us, and is cleverer than the whole of the rest of us put together. You like facing facts, Claudia, so let's face them.”

Claudia gently laid down her two blades of grass.

Then she said, with great sweetness:

“But of course, Anna dear, if you want to. Though I don't know that I quite see what facts there are to face.”

“I do,” Sal Oliver irrepressibly broke in.

Claudia kept a careful silence.

It was Anna who turned to Sal and said:

“You know what I mean, don't you? Taffy's a splendid child, with any amount of personality, but she's getting self-assertive and aggressive. She knows it too.”

“She's very intelligent,” said Frances softly.

“Has she talked to you about what she wants to do?” Claudia asked quickly.

“As a matter of fact, she has.”

Claudia laughed, with a slightly impatient sound.

“For heaven's sake, my dear, don't sound so apologetic about it! Whatever else I may be, I'm not, and never have been, a possessive mother. What does it matter whether Taffy talks to you, or me, or anybody else? All that matters is that she
should develop freely and on her own lines.”

“Which is just what she probably isn't doing,” Anna observed in a detached tone. “You see, my dear, you've got a terribly strong personality, and with the best will in the world, you do dominate your surroundings, absolutely. You've told me yourself that Taffy's attitude—her sort of defiance towards you—has worried you.”

“Yes,” Claudia admitted it thoughtfully. “That's quite true. But it isn't anything so very unusual, after all, in a rather self-willed, rather egotistical schoolgirl. Especially when her father—to be quite frank—doesn't set her a particularly good example of courtesy or self-control. Besides, you're all talking as if the alternative to Anna's scheme was that I should tie Taffy to my apron-strings in the good old-fashioned style. Directly she leaves school she'll go into a job, just exactly as Sylvia is going to do. Unless I can afford to send her to Oxford, or she gets a scholarship.”

“I wonder what you'd say if it was an indifferent case—somebody not in any way connected with yourself,” Anna observed.

“I should say exactly the same. Why, Anna, you know I should! I have
always,”
said Claudia with emphasis, “always refused to allow my own personal feelings to interfere with my judgment.”

“Darling, you haven't. I know you think you have. But you haven't. Honestly and truly, you're deceiving yourself completely.”

There was absolute silence for a long moment. Frances Ladislaw's hands gripped one another nervously.

Claudia, who had flushed deeply, opened her lips once as if to speak, and then closed them again firmly.

“Fly at me,” urged Anna childishly, “be as angry as you like. I know it's an awful thing to have said. But it's true.” She fixed her eyes tearfully on her sister.

“It's this awful picture that you've built up of yourself in your own mind, as a bread-winner, and a wife, and a mother—and it's all artificial and unreal. It never goes below the surface for one minute.”

With Anna's outburst, Claudia seemed to recover her self-command—if, indeed, it had ever been in jeopardy.

“You know, Anna, I don't think you're quite a fair judge where I'm concerned. In fact I'm sure you're not. I'll tell you why in a minute. But first, I'd like to know if Frances thinks as you do.”

She turned her great eyes towards Frances Ladislaw.

“We've known each other all our lives, practically, and nothing is going to alter the fact of our friendship. Please tell me: Is there any truth in what Anna's been saying, or is it just that she's utterly biassed, utterly fixed in some old, unconscious resentment that has its roots—we may as well face it—in the fact that I bullied her and domineered over her as a child and as a young girl?”

Never, it seemed to Frances, had her brilliant friend been so fluent, so outspoken, and so wholly unconvincing.

“Please answer me,” urged Claudia gently.
“You see, if what Anna says is in
any
way true, I want to face it quite frankly and honestly, and accept it with my feelings as well as with my mind. That, really, is the only way to put things right, isn't it? At the moment, naturally, I can't accept any of it—Anna seems to me quite incapable of forming an impartial judgment where I'm concerned, and Sal—and I'm saying this quite without any kind of resentment—Sal doesn't happen to like me very much.”

It almost seemed, thought Frances, rather dazed, as if Claudia was unable to stop talking.

At last she drew breath.

“Well, Frances dear? Is it true that I dramatize myself all the time, that I'm not honest as to my own motives? That's really what Anna has been saying, isn't it? Is it true?”

“It isn't all the truth,” Frances answered, “but I believe it's part of the truth. I'm sorry, Claudia. You asked me to tell you what I thought.”

Claudia unexpectedly broke into a ringing, oddly febrile, laugh.

“But why be sorry, my dear? As you say, I asked you. It's interesting if it's nothing else. Besides, you may be absolutely right. Anyhow, all I can do is to look the whole thing straight in the face as dispassionately as I can. I do promise you that I'll do that.”

She got up with a resolute movement.

“I don't want to break this off at all. It is, quite honestly, extraordinarily interesting. But if I don't go and see about making the tea, we shan't get any. Come when you're ready.”

She smiled at them calmly and walked away.

“Poor darling,” said Anna, frowning a little. “She's angry.”

“Very angry indeed,” Sal Oliver responded tranquilly. “But I don't think she knows it.”

Sylvia was an admirable tennis-player, Adolf Zienszi good, although never brilliant, and Copper played a nervous, erratic, spectacular game. Quarrendon, as he had rightly told them, was very bad indeed. In whatever combination they played, Quarrendon and his partner invariably lost the set. It constituted, he gently pointed out, a discouraging coincidence.

“Let's leave Daddy and uncle Adolf to have a single,” suggested Sylvia.

They crept quietly past Mrs Peel, whose head had fallen on one side, but whose hands, encased in white wash-leather gloves, were still neatly folded in her lap.

“She's asleep,” Sylvia murmured. “Do you know,
now,
I feel I can't bear to waste a single minute in sleep. I want to be awake every minute of the time, just to realize how happy I am. I never knew life could be anything like this. Do you mind, Andrew, if I say all the things that have been said before by novelists and people like that? You see, I never realized before that they could actually be
true.”

She turned her shining eyes towards him, and he thought he had never seen anything so lovely.

“Where are we going, darling?”

“I was going to take you to a lane behind the orchard. No one ever goes there—it isn't a proper lane at all. I'm not sure that even Mother knows about it, although this was her home when she was a child. That's why we came here, of course. We lived in Hampstead before.”

“You ought to live in the country. You're so like a flower.”

“What a lovely thing to be told! But I shall have to live in London soon—at least, except for the week-ends, I suppose. I may be going to get a job almost at once. Andrew—are you ever in London?”

“I'm going to be,” said Andrew promptly. “Quite often.”

“Let's talk about what we'll do.”

Instead of answering, he took her hand in his and held it lightly. Thus they walked down the slopes of the cherry-orchard, and then Sylvia showed him a steep bank thickly covered in cow-parsley.

“We can get over that, and then we're in the lane. I'll go first.”

She was up and over the bank with the grace of a wild young animal. Quarrendon blundered after her, regretfully conscious of his weight and his awkwardness.

The lane was a disused bridle-path, deeply sunken between hedges and with the trees meeting overhead in a dense canopy.

“If we go here——” said Sylvia. She guided him to a tiny mound at the foot of a great beech-tree, and they sat down on the ground.

It was a long while before either of them spoke. Then Sylvia said:

“What are we going to do, about seeing one another again?”

“I can meet you in London. When do you go to see about the job?”

“Tuesday.”

“The day I go. I'll drive you up.”

“That'll be lovely. Andrew.”

“My dear.”

“I'd like to ask you something. Don't answer if you don't want to.”