Homing (30 page)

Jeff sought out Oliver, as usual.

“Do you think,” he asked directly with no beating about the bush, “it is time now for her to go to Williamsburg?”

“Can you face the consequences?” Oliver put it to him as directly.

“Yes,” said Jeff without blinking. “That’s what consequences are for.”

“You learn,” said Oliver.

“Slowly. And with difficulty.”

They smiled at each other, with understanding and affection.

“Shall you go with her?” Oliver asked.

“Oh, no
.
Not yet. You see—I may have got
myself sorted out
a bit by now—so that I can see my way. But she’s had another haymaker. She won’t be able to see straight for some time to come. Even without that, I’m not sure I could have handled it alone.” He paused. “She will have to go back to them,” he said. “Back to Tibby and Julian.”

Oliver nodded, without surprise.

“In ordinary times I would have said you were playing with fire,” he said. “Psychologically. But these are not ordinary times. She has had a terrible shock—more than once. If she is not allowed to escape in one way, she may find another—less suitable. Always provided you are ready to follow through on it.”

“I’m afraid I have never had much choice,” said Jeff.

“Sometimes it seems as though we don’t. Are you going to fly her over?”

“That’s a problem,” said Jeff. “On account of the dog. I shall let her decide, of course, but I doubt if she’ll leave him behind and I doubt if he can go on a plane.”

“Be sure that she understands what a voyage in convoy means.”

“I have a hunch that if this comes off at all, Virginia will go with her,” Jeff said.

“Do her good,” Oliver agreed.

So the next thing was to approach Virginia, which Jeff did as soon as possible, with Oliver to back him up.

“We’ll have to go by sea,” she said matter-of-factly. “They wouldn’t take a dog by way of Lisbon.”

“You mean you’ll
do
it
?” His voice cracked delightedly.

“There’s no one else to do it,” she said. “She can’t possibly set out alone. Are you going to break it to her or am I?”

“It’s mine,” said Jeff, and went up to Mab’s room and knocked.

She was always glad to see him, of course. But there was a layer of air between her and the world which nothing penetrated any more. She existed behind it, alone, forlorn, enduring. He sat down beside the bed and took her hand in both his.

“Mab, there’s something I want you to do. For me.”

“Of course,” she said without interest.

“I want you to go
to Williamsburg now—with Virginia.”

“Without you?”

“Perhaps I can fly over, later.”

She lay looking up at him, her hand in his. And while he watched, her eyes filled with tears which spilled over and ran
down her cheeks. Instinctively he reached for her, gathered her into his arms.

“How did you know?” she gasped, holding to him convulsively. “Oh, Jeff, how do you
always
know?”

“Know what, my darling?”

“I want to go!” she sobbed. “I’ve
got
to go! But it looks like running away!”

“No such thing,” said Jeff. “You’ve had your war, and you’ve stood up to it.”

“It’s not that,” she sobbed. “It’s not the war.”

“What then, Mab? Tell me.”

But she had no words to say that she both feared and craved his daily presence, until the strain of a daily renunciation was too much, on top of everything else, to contemplate. And that the only alternative, never to see him at all, was a prospect which filled her with despair. Overwrought and physically exhausted by months of tension and inner conflict, she wept hopelessly in his arms for what she believed was the last time.

“Now you listen to me,” Jeff said, shaken by her sobbing. “You and Virginia are going to Williamsburg. You’ll have a nasty ten days at sea, but Noel can’t fly and I know better than to ask you to leave him behind. I shan’t know a moment’s peace night or day till I get word that you have arrived safely, but the risk is not too bad now. You will live in my house in Williamsburg, you will sleep in my room, in the very bed I was born in. You will have Basil and Nanny and Virginia for company, besides your Cousin Gwen and Fitz, who live a few streets away in the house Evadne stayed in while she was there. You’ll have all
Williamsburg
, from top to bottom, at your disposal, with Jamestown thrown in. And pretty soon you’ll find that you have come home, and things will look a lot different to you.”

She had stopped crying, spent and resigned. Home it might be, in the end, but now it was exile. And it was best. Even he could see that it was best for them to be apart. He laid his lips against her temple, and settled her back on the pillows.

“Old Doctor Day himself has prescribed,” he said. “It’s going to be kind of dull around here without you, and I may prescribe a trip for myself by and by. Meanwhile you’ll be in time for a Virginia April—and that is something to see. Will you write to me?”

“Yes, Jeff.”

“Don’t think you’re being sent into exile,” he cautioned,
reading her thoughts with his usual ease. “You have been there before.”

She tried to smile, looking up at him from the pillow—very small and thin and white.

“‘Thy people shall be my people,’” said Mab.

“‘—and the Lord do so unto me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me,’” said Jeff, and forced himself to rise and take his gaze from her. “I’ll tell Virginia to start packing. And you’d better break it to Noel that he’s going to be seasick.”

“
D
O YOU
know where you are now?” Fitz asked quietly, keeping his eyes on the road as he drove.

Richmond lay behind them, as the day drew in. The trees on either side of the road stood tall and aloof, cutting off the setting sun, too close together to allow more than a suspicion of the river on the right. Little dusty lanes led off at angles, with obscure, tipsy signs. Almost uninhabited crossroads occurred at long intervals.

“Jamestown will be somewhere on the right,” Mab said, looking straight ahead of her. Her hands were clasped tight in her lap, her eyes were enormous.

“Another ten miles. We just passed Westover. Farthingale plantation used to lie over there. It burned down during the War Between the States.”

“Is there anything left to show?”

“Used to be a few bricks when I was a kid. We don’t own the land any more.”

Soon the car emerged into a clearing, with a lane to the right, and Mab looked back.

“Jamestown,” she said softly.

“That’s it. First fine day we’ll have a picnic there. Kind of spoiled now, with the museum and the turnstiles and the picture postcards. But we still go there, and eat our sandwiches beside the river.”

The long, blacked-out voyage was over. There had been a dazzling night in New York, which was ablaze with light—the kind of dinner you couldn’t get in England any more—and a bed which stood still in a large hotel room whose uncurtained windows looked out across a spangled park.

And now, with Gwen and Virginia in the back seat, and Noel sitting erect and watchful between herself and Fitz in front,
they came to Williamsburg. A cable had gone back to Jeff—and although she felt unreasonably that every mile took her further away from him, a mounting excitement had her by the throat, as though the curtain was about to go up on a new play.

She saw the College, with its sweep of lawn—the Duke of Gloucester Street, under arching mulberry trees—the brick church, standing as it had always stood in its simple yard—the Palace Green, with a glimpse of gates and cupolas at the end of it—the Court House, just where she looked for it—the car turned off to the right, then left again….

“Here we are,” said Fitz, as they came to a stop in front of a long white house with green shutters and a portico. “This is Jeff’s house, Mab. Ours is just across the way.”

“I feel very strange,” Virginia announced, stepping out of the car rather slowly, and pausing to look around her. It was the house where her mother had been born, and had fallen in love with Cabot Murray the Yankee, when to love a Yankee was out of the question in the South. It was the house to which she had come many times as a girl, turning young men’s heads at the Christmas parties with her New York clothes and her travelled, transatlantic ideas of what she wanted her future to be. Well, it had all come true—Archie, and Farthingale, and the children—a great love affair, in its quiet way, a storybook life, before the first war—then tragedy and loss, and a sort of serenity, before the next war began—and now she was back, as it were, where she started from, but with a telegram in her handbag which had been awaiting her at the hotel in New York, and which said simply:
May
I
come
and
see
you?
Tracy.
And somehow she had not had the heart to leave it behind in a wastebasket, even though she had not yet had the courage to answer it, yes or no. She had brought it with her, and that was a bad sign, she thought, as she stood beside the car, gazing at the house, which would be so full of memories. “I feel rather like a ghost, after all these years,” she said slowly. “The house hasn’t changed, Fitz.”

“We’re putting everything back the way it was,” Fitz said. “In between was the bad time. You missed that part.”

Mab had got down even more slowly, entangled in Noel’s lead, and she too stood still, absorbing her surroundings.

“I had forgotten—” she began, and left it there.

No one questioned her. Fitz gathered up some of the luggage, and the front door was opened by Hagar, who had been born
since Virginia left Williamsburg for the last time, but who was always in charge of the Day house when it was inhabited nowadays.

“This is Delilah’s daughter Hagar,” Gwen said, and Virginia said, “Oh, of course,” and held out both hands to the smiling coloured woman, who clasped them warmly and said, “Welcome home, Miss Virginia, you bin a long time gittin’ heah!”

“I have indeed,” Virginia agreed. “And this is my
granddaughter
Mab.”

Mab offered her hand, and Hagar took it in both her black ones, her eyes fixed solemnly on Mab’s face.

“Ain’t it a miracle?” she murmured. “Mas’ Fitz, you done tole me ahead o’ time, but would you believe it? It’s de Ole Mistess come home again, as suah as you’ah a foot high. You done
tole
me, but I nebbah believed—”

There was a scurry on the stairs and Basil was among them, grown, and happy, and less (as Virginia perceived at once) objectionable, now that Nurse had had full charge of him for a while. Things went into a welter of dog and small boy and Mab and Nurse and smiling coloured faces as the luggage was carried in—and Mab found herself finally in the drawing room with lights coming on and a late tea table beside the wood fire, and the sound of ice in a cocktail shaker—“It’s a Daiquiri, Virginia, do you mind?” from Fitz, and Virginia who had drunk nothing but Martinis for years, accepted a Daiquiri with enthusiasm, and Mab and Gwen had tea with a smitch of rum in it from a slender silver jug.

And suddenly, holding her cup and laughing at Noel who sat with his paws up beside Gwen asking for buttered toast, Mab glanced higher, above the mantelpiece, and met her own eyes in the portrait of Tibby—with the same sensation as when one encounters an unexpected mirror. She sobered involuntarily, gazing back, and it seemed to her that the painted lips deepened in a smile. Fitz followed the direction of her gaze.

“Yes, there she is, waiting for you,” he said, as though Mab had spoken. “Are you surprised?”

“N-no,” said Mab gravely. “Jeff said she would be here. But even then, I had no idea—” She put down her cup and went to stand beneath the portrait, looking up. “We are alike, aren’t we,” she said, pleased.

“It was rather a long drive,” Virginia said, and rose, with a glance at Gwen. “And Mab is supposed to rest before dinner.
You’ll stay and have it here with us, won’t you—there’s still so much to talk about.”

Fitz said he would just run the luggage home and come back in half an hour. Gwen led the way for Virginia and Mab up the wide uncarpeted stairs.

“First door on the left for Mab,” she said. “That’s Jeff’s room, which was also Tibby’s. It looks out the front. She liked to keep track of things in the street, they say.”

“I’ll bet she did,” said Virginia, and they followed Mab, who paused on the threshold of the big front bedroom, enchanted.

A fire had been lighted on the hearth. The furniture was old mahogany, burnished by generations of loving black hands. The wallpaper was sprigged with flowers, and the ruffled curtains were as crisp as a ballerina’s skirts. A deep armchair stood by the broad window, from where they could see Fitz in the dusk outside turning on the lights of the car and driving away. Gwen touched a wall switch near the door and shaded lamps came on all round the room.

“No blackout!” sighed Virginia with rapture. “I shall never get used to that again!”

Light caught the bright brass bales on the chiffoniers, warmed the rosy rug, spilled across the counterpane of the great canopied bed, turned the windowpanes blue, and illuminated the little reminiscent smile on Mab’s face as she advanced into the middle of the room—where she stopped short, staring at the portrait which faced the bed from the opposite wall.

“
It’s
Jeff!
”
she cried, as though he had walked into the room.

Virginia and Gwen exchanged glances.

“That’s Julian,” said Virginia. “Didn’t Jeff tell you?”

“He told me I looked like Tibby, a long time ago,” said Mab. “He never said that he was Julian!”

“Well, there you are,” said Virginia gently. “We’ll leave you now to get settled in, but you’d better tuck up on the bed for a few minutes first of all. Come along, Gwen, I want to put on a new face before dinner.”

Alone in the room which was hers and Jeff’s and Tibby’s—and Julian’s—Mab sat down slowly in the armchair by the window, and when Noel came and lay down across her feet as he always did in a strange room, she leaned her head against the back of the chair and closed her eyes. Home again, she thought—
you
have
been
there
before,
Jeff said. It was for this that he had sent her on that nightmare voyage in a blacked-out ship, with the
lifeboat drills and the depth charges going off and the swing of a zigzagging run, and the competent, smiling crew, and the
determinedly
cheerful passengers—all behaving as though the Athenia and the
City
of
Benares
had never been heard of. For this
homecoming
, this undreamed-of peace which was like a fragrance in the air she breathed.

And sitting there under the eyes of the portrait she drifted into a doze, her head against the wing of the chair, the dog’s warm body against her feet. Grief and tension and the daily necessity to be strong beyond her strength drained away. Already she had begun to heal.

They found her there when they looked in on their way down to dinner, as Fitz drove up again outside. She woke without effort when they spoke to her, smiled at them, skipped into the
bathroom
to wash, and arrived downstairs with an appetite.

“Butter,”
she said, as she had said last night in the New York hotel. “I never thought butter could be so important. Can I have lots?”

“Oh, Gawd bless de chile,” said Hagar, almost in tears, as she served them. “Dere’s all de butter in de state ob Virginny effn she wants it!”

“I am a pig,” said Mab without compunction. “But they won’t have any more in England if I have less here, will they?”

“It’s not only the rationing and shortages that make meals difficult over there,” Virginia explained to Gwen. “When your stomach is in a knot because of the latest News bulletin you don’t even relish the food you’ve got.”

“I know it’s wrong to feel so happy here,” said Mab, gazing dreamily at her full plate. “But I don’t think Jeff would mind.” She looked round at them doubtfully. “It’s not
possible
it’s the same world,” she marvelled. “Hitler’s still there. But look at us here. There may be a raid over London this very minute.”

“They won’t be any safer if you worry,” Virginia reminded her.

“I know. And I don’t worry, really, any more. There’s
something
about this place,” Mab said gravely, “that makes it
unnecessary
to worry.”

They sat a long time over the meal, and Mab listened fascinated to reminiscences that went all the way back to the war in Cuba in ’99—where Fitz as a correspondent had so far forgotten
himself
as to get a rifle and shoot back at the Spaniards, which was against the rules. How Mab would love to be here tonight,
Evadne had said, hearing the same stories in the autumn of ’38. And now Mab heard them, breathless and aglow, and begged for more.

Then Noel had his evening walk, in the soft southern dark with lights shining behind the windows and the undimmed
street lamps
overhead, to Mab’s renewed delight, and the Spragues drove away. Once more Mab climbed the broad stairs,
accompanied
by Virginia and Noel—to find that Hagar had provided a sumptuous cushion for Noel in the corner nearest the bed, dropped the Venetian blind across the window, unpacked Mab’s bags, laid out her night things, and turned down the covers.

Virginia kissed her good night, and they laughed together at Noel as he took possession with a comfortable sigh.

“I’m just across the hall, in what used to be Cousin Sue’s room—it’s all so cosy, isn’t it, to think my own mother shared it when they were girls—so long ago, and yet—” Virginia sighed without sorrow, almost with contentment, “—perhaps they’re not very far away, after all. Be sure to let me know if you feel strange, or can’t sleep.” She closed the door gently behind her.

Mab got ready for bed, the little smile on her lips again. She had seldom felt less strange in her life. Tomorrow they were going to lunch with Fitz and Gwen at the Sprague house, and all Williamsburg lay ahead of her—the Palace—the Capitol—the Raleigh Tavern—all put back the way it was. And down at the end of Waller Street, where they said there was only a railway bridge and petrol pumps—what? Now she would see for herself….

She got into bed—a bed so deep, so soft—so wide, so fragrant of something that was not lavender—the pillows received her tired body like heavenly arms. There would be no depth charges tonight—no German planes overhead—just stillness and safety and peace, for miles, hundreds of miles around.

The bedside table held books and a small radio, all her own. She looked at them blissfully, but without curiosity. Later. Tomorrow. There would be lots of tomorrows. One could afford to wait.

With all the lights out except the one within reach of her hand, she stretched herself in the big bed, feeling small and snug. Noel had already begun to
snore softly, which meant that he was all worn out. Let him. There was no one else to hear.

She raised her eyes to the portrait which faced her from the opposite wall, as Tibby had done every night during all the years
she had lain there alone after Julian was dead and gone. She had married at sixteen—he was older, he was the schoolmaster…. Now it was Mab looking up at the portrait, another link in the chain, waiting for it all to begin again. She smiled at Julian, secret, sure, secure—waiting.

“Good night, Jeff,” she said aloud, and put out the light.