‘I’d give you anything, you know.’
‘Yes.’
‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘you look so old and so wise, a curious kind of wisdom. I wonder what you are thinking about.’
‘I don’t often think,’ she told him. ‘There’s nothing to be curious about.’
‘You’re so terribly alive, and yet terribly inhuman in a way,’ he said, standing and looking moodily out of the window. ‘I’m not like that; why should you be?’
‘Don’t nag at me,’ she said. ‘I’m what I am. If I’m inhuman it’s your fault; you made me.’
‘That’s true enough,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I think I ought to have left you. You’d have been born dead if I hadn’t worked at you.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘We have fun, don’t we?’ She took hold of his hand and crumpled up his fingers, squeezing them against each other so that his signet ring cut his skin and he cried out.
‘I like your hands,’ she said, ‘they’re the best things about you,’ and then she dropped them and moved away, humming a tune.
‘There you are,’ he said, ‘that’s what I meant. Are you a child or do you do it on purpose?’
‘I don’t know what the devil you’re talking about,’ she said.
‘You’re a bloody liar,’ he said.
They were silent for about five minutes. It was getting dark. He could scarcely see her face. The fire burst in the grate and shot up in a quiver of flame lighting them to one another.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said abruptly. ‘I don’t want you to be angry.’
She crossed over and pinched the back of his neck.
‘I’m not angry.’
‘Is it that you’re a child and are happy like that?’ he said.
‘I expect so.’
‘You’ll tell me, won’t you, when you begin to feel things? You’ll come to me?’
‘You’d know without me telling you,’ she said.
They laughed, and she reached out for his hand.
Then there was the sound of a footstep in the hall.
‘Here’s Mother,’ said Gabriel softly. She moved away swiftly from the fire and began to turn up the lights. Julius looked at a magazine upside-down, whistling, and fondling the ears of a spaniel that had awakened with the flooding of the light. ‘What makes you think that Lorelei can’t be beaten in the 2.30 to-morrow at Epsom?’ he said, and then broke off suddenly as though surprised: ‘Hullo, Rache ...’
It was perhaps inevitable that Gabriel’s enthusiasm for racing, born so swiftly without warning and developing into an interest, extravagant and obsessional, should as suddenly receive a check and be in danger of bursting like a bubble.The passionate enjoyment of horses was still part of her, but a race meeting was no longer a thrill; there was a sameness about it. She had allowed herself a surfeit of it, had plunged too quickly and too deeply, and was now exhausted.
Gabriel looked about her for something new, and the next craze was yachting.
‘You see, Papa, I’ve set my heart on this; we’ve got to shine like we do on the turf. No half measures, no dawdling about on the Norfolk broads; we must start with the best and go in for first-class stuff. Why not take a house at Cowes for the summer? - I don’t mind missing Epsom and Ascot this year. I want to learn to sail, and I want to be taught by the best yachting skipper you can find. Do the thing properly, Papa, start coping now.You’ll have to pull strings to belong to the right yacht clubs, but it oughtn’t to be difficult with all your money. Let’s make a splash.’
And Julius Lévy did as he was told.
The idea was another shock to Rachel, who had scarcely accustomed herself yet to the endless race meetings and hunting seasons and houses at Newmarket and Melton, and people and conversation concerning themselves with no other subject but horse-flesh.
‘What - not yachting on top of all this racing and hunting?’ she protested. ‘I don’t see how you’ll have time.’
‘Yachting’s only from May to September; don’t be absurd,’ said her daughter. ‘You know one doesn’t hunt in the summer and I’m off racing for the time. One must do something.Anyway, yachting’s the most terrible thrill.’
‘Julius - aren’t we being ridiculously extravagant?’ argued Rachel. ‘We never used to do all these things. I often feel nowadays that people are laughing at us; we’re overdoing it. It’s - well - almost vulgar, this show of opulence.’
Julius flushed angrily.
‘Don’t talk such awful muck,’ he shouted. ‘People laughing at us - what in the name of God do you mean? Why should they laugh at us? I’m as good as anyone else, aren’t I? A damn sight better - what? I could buy up the whole bloody yachting and racing crowd if I wanted to. Extravagant? It’s my money, isn’t it? I’ve worked for it, God knows. Worked a damned sight harder than any thick-headed Englishman.’
‘Oh! don’t shout like that,’ said Rachel wearily. ‘I don’t want to argue with you. I notice things if you don’t. That’s all.’
‘What things?’
‘When Gabriel was a baby we lived very happily without all this fuss and showing off. We lived very well, we had interesting people about us, we gave lovely parties. And there was something dignified about those days. I can’t explain. You’re spoiling it all now.’
‘Dignity, eh? You’re a fine one to chitter about dignity. I suppose you thought your father was dignified when he blew his brains out after he’d made a mess of his life?’
‘That’s unnecessary, Julius, and very cruel.’
Rachel turned away, pale, her mouth trembling.
Julius laughed. ‘Oh, don’t be a wet blanket, Rache. I don’t interfere with you much. You enjoy your concerts and your books and the highbrow talk of your intellectual pals. Let Gabriel and me alone to enjoy our things. We’re different.’
Rachel turned before leaving the room, her hand on the door.
‘You don’t know what a mistake you’re making,’ she said slowly. ‘Gabriel’s barely seventeen and before she’s twenty-one she’ll have had everything. What sort of a life is it going to be for her - after that? Have you ever thought?’
Julius shrugged his shoulders.
‘When I was twenty-one I was starving in a garret and working fifteen hours a day as a baker’s apprentice. I want my daughter to hold the world in her hands.’ There was a silence, and then:
‘Sometimes,’ said Rachel, ‘I’m very sorry for you both.’ She hesitated a moment as though she would say something more, and then she went out of the room.
Julius yawned and stretched out his arms.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ he said.
Gabriel laughed softly and reached for a cigarette. ‘Jealous,’ she said.
‘D’you think so?’ Julius sat up. ‘Oh! hell, that’s funny, isn’t it?’
The idea excited him. He pulled the box of cigarettes away from Gabriel.
‘Don’t smoke,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘Not until you’re eighteen.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Gabriel. ‘I do as I like,’ and she lit a cigarette.
‘You’ve never done it before,’ he said. ‘What’s it mean?’
‘A gesture,’ she said, blinking her eyelids, and blowing a cloud in his face.
‘If we get this cruising boat,’ he said, ‘we’ll go down to the Mediterranean, shall we? Down to Sicily and up the Adriatic, and you shall show me Venice.’
‘Yes - sometime.’
‘Not this summer?’
‘No - I want to sail at Cowes.’
‘We might go down in the winter.’
‘I shall be hunting this winter as usual.’
‘The following summer?’
‘Oh!’ She rose in irritation. ‘Don’t harp at me, it bores me so. I’ll go with you when I want to and not before.’
He flushed under his skin, hating her.
‘You’re such a bitch,’ he said.
She took no notice of him. She was looking at a yachting paper.
‘By the way, I forgot to tell you I was in Cartier’s yesterday and chose a bracelet for you,’ he said; ‘a double row of diamonds, twisted. I told them to alter the clasp, it didn’t show up enough.’
‘Thanks,’ she said, and went on reading the paper.
Julius wondered whether she was sick of bracelets. She would perhaps have been better pleased with him had he chosen a necklace instead. He made a mental note to order a necklace in the morning. Meanwhile he poured himself out a drink and waited moodily until she would be ready to be friends with him again.
The five months of yachting passed swiftly for Gabriel. She threw herself and her boundless energy into this new sport with the same fervour that she had given to horse-racing. Here was racing of a different sort - the thrill of a narrow-built, slender cutter heeling in a trough of a sea, the tall mast straining, the stiff breeze whistling in the huge spread of canvas, the lee rail awash, the thud and kick of the helm.
The skipper who trained Gabriel was a Clyde man, one of the most experienced yachtsmen afloat. Julius spared no expense to find the best teacher. The boat, a brand-new six-metre built that year, was named
Adieu Sagesse
- the suggestion of Julius.
Then there was the cruising yacht, a schooner of nearly two hundred tons, a beautiful thing of bravado and extravagance; one of those luxury vessels all white paint, scrolled gold and polished brass, with a deck like ballroom parquet.
Wanderer
she was called. She wandered between Southampton and Cowes and no farther. The Lévys used her perhaps half a dozen times that first summer. Gabriel could not be dragged away from her six-metre. She was racing mad - she spent all day and every day at the helm of
Adieu Sagesse
, the Clyde skipper at her elbow and Julius a passenger, generally in the way.
Julius, crouching in the cockpit that sloped at an angle of forty-five, wondered if all this was safe, and as he looked at Gabriel with her frown of concentration, her teeth biting her lip, and her hair swept by the wind, he was seized with a terror lest they should founder and drown, and he would only have had two years of her, paltry and insignificant. Only two years of companionship and so little yet to show for it; she still self-contained and a stranger in many ways. He thought of the passion that had been hers for riding, and now this fever for sailing that had taken its place. And he wondered with a curious sense of excitement what would be the next craze of her impetuous will, into what channels would her stream of energy wander, and whether this flow of spirits was the advance guard of high pressure that would be rapture and emotion and ecstasy.
It was an endless sensation of pleasure to him that he was able to do the things that she did, that his health and energy equalled hers, and that his fifty-odd years were no burden to him. He might have been without wisdom and married late, and then grown old before she was ready for him. Rachel had been decorative and helpful as a wife, but her utility was over now. Gabriel would make as good a hostess when she came out next year. She was modern, too, in advance of her age.
Rachel was getting fat like her mother before her; she had the set, heavy, Dreyfus look about her. She could not progress, she was early-Edwardian. He was conscious that Rachel’s expression irritated him now; it was sullen, discontented; he was aware that he did not want to see much of her. She did well to stay down at Granby or in Grosvenor Square. He was genial to her but no more than this; there was little friendship and no intimacy between them.
Rachel, for her part, joined her husband and daughter at intervals from a motive of pride. She could not bear that her friends should pity her. She knew instinctively the gossip that touched them - Julius, Gabriel and herself - the slight contempt that clings about a neglected wife, the lies, the curiosity. The absurd rumours of divorce, the cheap newspaper minds of men and women.
She loathed this sort of publicity, the indignity and squalor attached to any knowledge of people’s private affairs.
So she appeared now and again on board the
Wanderer
and in the house at Cowes, and later up at Melton during the autumn, tactful and calm, her face a mask, studiously agreeable to Gabriel and Julius and their friends, knowing in her heart that her presence was a blind convention of her own, and that they all laughed at her behind her back.
She, too, waited for Gabriel to pass to the next craze, hoping with bitter, grim tenacity that the girl of eighteen would wake up suddenly and throw away her crude, unbroken, dangerous charm and fall in love and lose her individuality. Then only would she be harmless and natural; the wife of some man or even his mistress - Rachel did not care - and lead her own life in her own way, possessed and held at last. Rachel would see the man as a saviour, whoever he should be. Then Julius would understand what a fool he had made of himself these last years, he would realise his age and his whitening hairs, he would come back to Rachel and Granby, and their old interests together. Side by side they would drift into the serenity of their middle years.
So Rachel, like a prisoner who awaits the final verdict, bided her time amongst the roses at Granby, reading Schopenhauer, petting her griffon, worrying herself over a pain in her side that was sometimes imaginary and sometimes real.
The yachting season finished at the end of September, and the boats were laid up for the winter.
Gabriel looked forward to a good time at Melton. Papa would be there, of course, and the house always filled with a crowd. Not Mother, she hoped. Mother brought her disapproving personality and stifled the house in an atmosphere of gloom. She always wanted to talk about books and music, and made such a fool of herself in front of the hunting crowd. Nobody felt at her ease. Papa would go sulky and red under the skin like a schoolboy; he was always difficult to manage when Mother was around. He seemed to think Mother would be continually listening at doors or peeping through keyholes.
‘What the devil does it matter if she does?’ Gabriel would say, losing her temper, and then he would cross silently to a door and fling it open, hoping to surprise Rachel in the act of eavesdropping, and find nobody, of course.