Giant's Bread (28 page)

‘Nell. But –'

‘She thinks I'm telephoning to you. When you're ready, you can go outside the front door and ring the bell – and may God have mercy on both our souls.'

‘But Jane. Nell … what does she want?'

‘If you still want to marry her, Vernon, now is your chance.'

‘But I'll have to tell her –'

‘What? That you've been leading a “gay life”, that you've been “wild”? All the usual euphemisms! That's all she'll expect – and she'll be grateful to you for laying as little stress on that as possible. But tell her about you and me – and you bring it from the general to the particular – and take the child through Hell. Muzzle that noble conscience of yours and think of her.'

Vernon rose slowly from the bed.

‘I don't understand you, Jane.'

‘No, probably you never will.'

He said, ‘Has Nell thrown over George Chetwynd?'

‘I haven't asked for details. I'm going back to her now. Hurry up.'

She left the room. Vernon thought, ‘I've never understood Jane, I never shall. She's so damned disconcerting. Well, I suppose I've been a sort of passing amusement to her. No, that's ungrateful. She's been damned decent to me. Nobody could have been more decent than Jane has been. But I couldn't make Nell understand that. She'd think Jane was dreadful …'

As he shaved and washed rapidly, he said to himself:

‘All the same, it's out of the question. Nell and I could never come together again – Oh! I don't suppose there's any question of that. She's probably only come to ask me to forgive her, to make her feel comfortable in case I get killed in this bloody war. The sort of thing a girl would do. Anyway, I don't believe I care any more.'

Another voice, deep down, said ironically, ‘Oh, no, not at all. Then why is your heart beating and your hand shaking? You bloody ass, of course you care!'

He was ready. He went outside – rang the bell. A mean subterfuge – unworthy – he felt ashamed. Jane opened the door. She said, rather like a parlour-maid, ‘In here,' and waved him towards the sitting-room. He went in, closing the door behind him.

Nell had risen at his entrance. She stood with her hands clasped in front of her.

Her voice came faint and weak, like a guilty child.

‘Oh, Vernon …'

Time swept backwards. He was in the boat at Cambridge … on the bridge at Ranelagh. He forgot Jane, he forgot everything. He and Nell were the only people in the world.

‘Nell.'

They were clinging together, breathless as though they had been running. Words tumbled from Nell's lips.

‘Vernon – if you want – I do love you – Oh! I do … I'll marry you any time – at once – today. I don't mind about being poor or
anything
!'

He lifted her off her feet, kissed her eyes, her hair, her lips.

‘Darling – oh! darling. Don't let's waste a minute – not a minute. I don't know how you get married. I've never thought about it. But let's go out and see. We'll go to the Archbishop of Canterbury – isn't that what you do – and get a special licence? How the devil
do
you get married?'

‘We might ask a clergyman?'

‘Or there's a Registry Office. That's the thing.'

‘I don't think I want to be married at a Registry Office. I'd feel rather like a cook or a house parlourmaid being engaged.'

‘I don't think it's that kind, darling. But if you'd rather be married in a church, let's be married in a church. There are thousands of churches in London, all with nothing to do. I'm sure one of them will love to marry us.'

They went out together, laughing happily. Vernon had forgotten everything – remorse – conscience – Jane …

At half-past two that afternoon Vernon Deyre and Eleanor Vereker were married in the church of St Ethelred's, Chelsea.

It was six months later that Sebastian Levinne had a letter from Joe.

‘St George's Hotel, Soho.

Dear Sebastian, – I'm over in England for a few days. I should love to see you. – Yours, Joe.'

Sebastian read and re-read the brief note. He was at his mother's house on a few days' leave, so it had reached him with no delay. Across the breakfast table he was conscious of his mother's eyes watching him, and he marvelled, as he had often done before, at the quickness of her maternal apprehension. She read his face, which most people found so inscrutable, as easily as he read the note in his hand.

When she spoke it was in ordinary commonplace tones.

‘Thome more marmalade, dear?' she said.

‘No, thanks, Mother.' He answered the spoken question first, then went on to the unspoken one of which he was so keenly conscious. ‘It's from Joe.'

‘Joe,' said Mrs Levinne. Her voice expressed nothing.

‘She's in London.'

There was a pause.

‘I see,' said Mrs Levinne.

Still her voice expressed nothing. But Sebastian was aware of a whole tumult of feeling. It was the same to him as though his mother had burst out, ‘My son, my son! And you were just beginning to forget her! Why does she come back like this? Why can't she leave you alone? This girl who has nothing to do with us or our race? This girl who was never the right wife for you and never will be.'

Sebastian rose.

‘I think I must go round and see her.'

His mother answered in the same voice, ‘I suppose so.'

They said no more. They understood each other. Each respected the other's point of view.

As he swung along the street, it suddenly occurred to Sebastian that Joe had given him no clue as to what name she was staying under at the hotel. Did she call herself Miss Waite or Madame La Marre? Unimportant, of course, but one of those silly conventional absurdities that made one feel awkward. He must ask for her under one or the other. How like Joe it was to have completely overlooked the point!

But as it happened there was no awkwardness, for the first person he saw as he passed through the swing doors was Joe herself. She greeted him with a glad cry of surprise.

‘Sebastian! I'd no idea you could possibly have got my letter so soon!'

She led the way to a retired corner of the lounge and he followed her.

His first feeling was that she had changed – she had gone so far away that she was almost a stranger. It was partly, he thought, her clothes. They were ultra French clothes. Very quiet and dark and discreet, but utterly un-English. Her face, too, was very much made up. Its creamy pallor was enhanced by art, her lips were impossibly red and she had done something to the corners of her eyes.

He thought, ‘She's a stranger – and yet she's Joe! She's the same Joe but she's gone a long way away – so far away that one can only just get in touch with her.'

But they talked together easily enough, each, as it were, putting out little feelers, as though sounding the distance that separated them. And suddenly the distance itself lessened, and the elegant Parisian stranger melted into Joe.

They talked of Vernon. Where was he? He never wrote or told one anything.

‘He's on Salisbury Plain – near Wiltsbury. He may be going out to France any minute.'

‘And Nell married him after all! Sebastian, I feel I was rather a beast about Nell. I didn't think she had it in her. I don't think she
would
have had it in her if it hadn't been for the war. Sebastian, isn't the war wonderful? What it's doing for people, I mean.'

Sebastian said drily that he supposed it was very much like any other war. Joe flew out at him vehemently.

‘It isn't. It isn't. That's just where you're wrong. There's going to be a new world after it. People are beginning to see things – things they never saw before. All the cruelty and the wickedness and the waste of war. And they'll stand together so that such a thing shall never happen again.'

Her face was flushed and exalted. Sebastian perceived that the war had, as he phrased it, ‘got' Joe. The war did get people. He had discussed it and deplored it with Jane. It made him sick to read the things that were printed and said about the war. ‘A world fit for heroes', ‘The war to end war', ‘The fight for democracy'. And really all the time, it was the same old bloody business it always had been. Why couldn't people speak the truth about it?

Jane had disagreed with him. She maintained that the clap-trap (for she agreed it
was
clap-trap) which was written about war was inevitable, a kind of accompanying phenomenon inseparable from it. It was Nature's way of providing a way of escape – you had to have that wall of illusion and lies to help you to endure the solid facts. It was, to her, pitiable and almost beautiful – these things that we wanted to believe and told ourselves so speciously.

Sebastian had said, ‘I dare say, but it's going to play Hell with the nation afterwards.'

He was saddened and a little depressed by Joe's fiery enthusiasm. And yet, after all, it was typical of Joe. Her enthusiasm always was red hot. It was a toss up which camp he found her in, that was all. She might just as easily have been a white hot pacifist, embracing martyrdom with fervour.

She said now accusingly to Sebastian:

‘You don't agree! You think everything's going to be just the same.'

‘There have always been wars, and they have never made any great difference.'

‘Yes, but this is a different kind of war altogether.'

He smiled. He could not help it.

‘My dear Joe, the things that happen to us personally are always different.'

‘Oh! I've no patience with you. It's people like you –'

She stopped.

‘Yes,' said Sebastian encouragingly. ‘People like me –'

‘You usen't to be like that. You used to have ideas. Now –'

‘Now,' said Sebastian gravely, ‘I am sunk in money. I'm a capitalist. Everyone knows what a hoggish creature the capitalist is.'

‘Don't be absurd. But I do think that money is rather – well, stifling.'

‘Yes,' said Sebastian, ‘that's true enough. But that's a question of effect on an individual. I will quite agree with you that poverty is a blessed state. Talking in terms of art, it's probably as valuable as manure in a garden. But it's nonsense to say that because I've got money, I'm unfit to make prognostications as to the future, and especially as to the state obtaining after the war. Just because I've got money I'm all the more likely to be a good judge. Money has got a lot to do with war.'

‘Yes, but because you think of everything in terms of money, you say that there always will be wars.'

‘I didn't say anything of the kind. I think war will eventually be abolished – I'd give it roughly another two hundred years.'

‘Ah! you do admit that by then we may have purer ideals.'

‘I don't think it's got anything to do with ideals. It's probably a question of transport. Once you get flying going on a commercial scale and you fuse countries together. Air charabancs to the Sahara, Wednesdays and Saturdays. That kind of thing. Countries getting mixed up and matey. Trade revolutionized. For all practical purposes, you make the world smaller. You reduce it in time to the level of a nation with counties in it. I don't think what's always alluded to as the Brotherhood of Man will ever develop from fine ideas – it will be a simple matter of common sense.'

‘Oh, Sebastian!'

‘I'm annoying you. I'm sorry, Joe dear.'

‘You don't believe in anything.'

‘Well, it's you who are the atheist, you know. Though, as a matter of fact, that word has gone out of fashion. We say nowadays that we believe in
Something
! Personally I'm quite satisfied with Jehovah. But I know what you meant when you said that, and you're wrong. I believe in beauty, in creation, in things like Vernon's music. I can't see any real defence for them economically, and yet I'm perfectly sure that they matter more than anything else in the world. I'm even prepared (sometimes) to drop money over them. That's a lot for a Jew!'

Joe laughed in spite of herself. Then she asked:

‘What was the
Princess in the Tower
really like? Honestly, Sebastian?'

‘Oh, rather like a giant toddling – an unconvincing performance and yet a performance on a different scale from anything else.'

‘You think that some day –'

‘I'm sure of it. There's nothing I'm so sure of as that. If only he isn't killed in this bloody war.'

Joe shivered.

‘It's so awful,' she murmured. ‘I've been working in the hospitals in Paris. Some of the things one sees!'

‘I know. If he's only maimed it doesn't matter – not like a violinist who is finished if he loses his right hand. No, they can mess up his body any way they like – so long as his brain is left untouched. That sounds brutal, but you know what I mean –'

‘I know. But sometimes – even then –' She broke off and then went on, speaking in a new tone of voice. ‘Sebastian, I'm married.'

If something in him winced he didn't show it.

‘Are you, my dear? Did La Marre get a divorce?'

‘No. I left him. He was a beast – a beast, Sebastian.'

‘I can imagine he might be.'

‘Not that I regret anything. One has to live one's life – to gain experience. Anything is better than shrinking from life. That's just what people like Aunt Myra can't understand. I'm not going near them at Birmingham. I'm not ashamed or repentant of anything I've done.'

She gazed at him defiantly and his mind went back to Joe in the woods at Abbots Puissants. He thought, ‘She's just the same. Wrong-headed, rebellious, adorable. One might have known then that she'd do these sort of things.'