Sunflower (16 page)

‘Oh, isn’t it awful!’ she giggled, and lifted up her arm in front of the window so that the folds of her cloak should prevent Essington from looking through it; but he looked out from his own side, and there was at any rate no keeping the house from him. And that, she found as the car stopped at the base of a wide flight of clipped stone steps with lace-work stucco banisters, and a footman opened the door, was worst of all. It was a villa of the sort that edge Wimbledon Common or Putney Heath, faced with a grey mixture of cement and sand the colour of cold porridge, and surmounted with a useless Italianate tower; but monstrously swollen beyond the size ordinary in its type. She felt curiously reluctant to climb the steps. There was something about the distension of the house and its hideousness that was a condemnation of everybody who had anything to do with it. ‘Somebody’s been proud,’ she thought, looking up at it; and she remembered the pig-face of the grocer her mother dealt with in Chiswick, who had inherited a little fortune and spent most of it building such a corpulent villa as this. One could imagine that it had been built by a man so brutishly stupid that when he was left a legacy that increased his income threefold he could think of nothing better to do than to get himself a house exactly like the one he was living in but three times as big. That accounted for the building of it; but there was no conceivable explanation why anyone who had the money to live there should not live somewhere else. It must, she feared, be another manifestation of that obvious male principle of unreason which made Essington prefer to live with her unpleasantly rather than pleasantly, which made him punish her for revealing intimacies to strangers by going on and on revealing to them things more intimate still …

Suddenly it seemed to her as if from all the windows of the three storeys, within their frames of heavy grey moulding, there looked that darkness, radiant yet black, like the eyes of blind men, which shines out of empty houses. She plucked at Essington’s coat-sleeve and said, under her breath, ‘Oh, Ess, I wish we hadn’t come.’

He suggested eagerly, ‘Well, if you stagger and faint, my dear, I don’t see what I can do but take you home.’

She hesitated. ‘But you want to meet Hurrell.’

‘I think, Sunflower, that tonight I’d rather take you home than see Hurrell.’ He spoke significantly, deferentially, humbly; as if there were a hidden meaning in his words, a meaning dependent on the enormous value which he set on her, and as if he dare not explain it save at her express request, since he was conscious he had done things which would justify her in forbidding him to speak any more of his love for her. His eyes were blinking.

Touched and puzzled, because she could see no reason for such a rush of emotion at this particular moment, she would have said, ‘Why, what is it, lovie?’ but just then her eye, roving over the house as over some sleeping enemy out of whose presence she was tiptoeing, caught sight of the butler standing by the open door at the top of the stone staircase, and perceived that something here was odd. His face wore a faintly appalled expression, which he was not attempting to conceal under the solemnity of his official bearing, but which he was actually presenting to the arriving visitors as if, for the time being, it were part of his official bearing. She glanced quickly at the footman who was standing beside him and saw on his face a younger version of the same expression: he looked strained and sullen, as if the sky of his youth would have been clear enough if other people had not exercised an unfair privilege and shadowed it with the clouds of their misfortunes. She exclaimed, ‘Ess, I believe there’s some trouble in this house. Let’s go and see if we can do anything!’ and started up the steps. Essington, left behind, uttered a faint wheeze of expostulation. She felt his reluctance like a noose cast round her, dragging her back, but she squared her shoulders and went on, for she felt she must have her way in this; and at the door she found him panting level with her.

The butler told them portentously, ‘Mr Pitt and Miss Pitt are detained with Sir Robert Cornelliss, but they will not be long,’ and stooped forward, as if to expand this statement with some further courtesy, some further ominousness, when his mouth fell open and he looked over his shoulder with an expression Sunflower identified as that which crosses the face of an actor when he sees a cat strolling in the wings during his big silent scene and is not sure whether the audience sees it or not. He seemed to be hearing some sound that they did not. Slowly, looking before them as if they were royalty but not doing it with ease, he led them into the amber shadows of a hall which was so impersonally furnished with large leather armchairs and sofas and the heads and skins of big game, that it might have been part of a club. After a certain point he seemed disconcerted that they were following him, and coming to a halt in front of an armchair in the middle of the room, he made exasperated gestures at the footman, who was standing in the doorway absorbedly watching his progress as one might watch a sportsman performing a difficult technical feat. Suddenly the footman understood what was expected of him, started forward jerkily and took their things, and began to head them off towards a door in the wall opposite to that towards which the butler had been leading them. Essington, who, when people behaved inexplicably always fancied that they were behaving insolently, gave a click of annoyance; and when, just as the footman opened the door, they heard a loud grunt which apparently proceeded from the butler, he spun round and glared at the man, who endured his gaze, but swallowed hard.

Sunflower giggled outright. And that the butler could not bear. He stepped aside and disclosed, lying asleep in the armchair he was shielding, a very tall man. His handsome, oblong face was blotched and scarlet; his large, oblong limbs were flung out in the stark yet loose abandonment of drunkenness. As they looked at him he belched.

Sunflower whispered, ‘Ugh! Who can he be?’

Essington could not answer for a minute, so violently was he trembling, ‘That is my successor in office, Lord Canterton.’

The four stood in silence for a minute, looking down on the drunkard, feeling drawn together by a community of decent feeling.

Essington murmured passionately, ‘When he was lord chancellor I have seen him so on the woolsack … The … the
shame
of it.’

She slipped her hand into his. ‘Never mind, dear, never mind. You’re well out of politics if this sort is getting in. You mustn’t get so worked up … dear …’ But she realised that she must move him on, for the situation was becoming horrid because the other two men were servants. The butler was looking as if he could have explained to them the presence of the drunkard in a way that would lift the suspicion of disorder from this house whose honour was his own, but could not because they were his master’s guests and he knew his place; his Scotch, sentimental face was waterlogged with self-pity and enjoyment of the martyrdom of his solid worth and natural dignity at the hands of social convention. ‘He isn’t half,’ she thought acidly, ‘enjoying himself.’ And the footman was smiling wetly and meanly, as if it amused him to see his betters shamed by one of their own kind. She wanted to cry out to him, ‘You and me are the same class, so I’ve a right to talk to you! You shouldn’t take their money if you feel like that about them!’ Rage flared in her at the look of his great healthy body with its broad shoulders and thick thighs, his handsome face, with its sound flesh and lips full of blood. Things had come to a pretty pass when strong men like this were content to put on funny clothes and wait on men they could have knocked down with a single drive of the fist and make it worse by sniggering at them behind their backs. Oddly she found herself thinking of her chauffeur Harrowby and including him in her anger, though he was nice as nice could be and never would laugh at anybody. In the background of her rage she saw the lights of Chiswick High Street and the Saturday night crowds ruddy-faced under the naphtha flares, and there was anguish in her vision of it. Some understanding about life she had found in those early days when she went with her mother and father among these crowds, which consisted of nothing but mothers and fathers and children, had been violated. She was none the better for her journey from those parts. At the end had been deception, abandonment. Irrational fury made her tremble as Essington was trembling. Ah, the poor dear! He would need a lot of quieting down, for Parliament was his church, a public man a priest to him. She said, ‘Take me away, that man makes me sick,’ and shepherded him through the door.

It was a pity that there were a man and a woman waiting in the library but they did not look as if they would intrude, for they belonged to the smart and jaunty type whom Essington loathed and who usually loathed Essington at sight. The man, who, standing by the vast circular mahogany table in the middle of the room, was pouring himself a drink from a curiously large cocktail shaker, looked at them over his shoulder with brilliant grey eyes that flickered like the tongue of an asp, and then turned away his head. The woman, who was bright with the marmalade tints of the weatherbeaten blonde, was sitting back in a leather armchair by a distant window, her eyes shut, though she held a glass on her knee; her small green felt hat was lying on the floor between her feet. Sunflower wondered who they were; they had the look of being News. She did not like the way they seemed to be at home in Francis Pitt’s house. They were in day-clothes, so it did not seem likely that they were stopping to dinner. She was glad of that. It really was a nuisance, these people being there, for there were all sorts of odd things in the room that might have taken Essington’s mind off Canterton. The same hand that had overdressed the ruined wall outside with saxifrages had filled the room with an astonishing excess of flowers. There were a dozen bowls of red and white roses on the big central table and on the massive writing-desk, and on the three or four funny little round tables with tops of inlaid coloured marble were vases filled a little too full with crucifixion lilies; and at the four corners of the bookshelves, which wove a hideous pattern round the room out of the solid blocks of harsh colours and grainy textures made by poorly bound complete sets, stood brass jars from which grew flaming azaleas. ‘It’s as if a railway waiting-room had gone gay,’ she thought, feeling cold, because she had to admit that there was something deeply wrong about the room. Like the house itself, it cast discredit on everybody who had anything to do with it, but more heavily on the man who lived there now than on the man who built it. This man lived in a better age, he had the money to live anywhere, he liked flowers. How could he bear this room? That perversity, that preference for the unpleasant rather than the pleasant …

She must say something to Essington, who was still trembling. ‘Isn’t it awful?’ she murmured. ‘Furnished in the year one, I should say. And the pictures—!’ She rested her hands on the hideous brawn-like marble of the mantelpiece, which was almost entirely covered from end to end with vases of the scarlet-spotted lilies, and looked up at the picture hanging above it. It was a Victorian historical tableau, representing one young woman in Saxon costume handing a crucifix to another similarly clad. Hopefully she asked, for he liked making jokes about that sort of thing, ‘What’s that supposed to be?’

‘Oh, that’s St Walburga giving the rood to St Editha.’

‘What’s she doing that for?’

He gazed at her severely. ‘That’s a rude question,’ he said with an air of rebuke.

She tittered delightedly. ‘Oh, you are …’ He would be better in no time.

The footman came to them with cocktails. As they turned to refuse they found that the man who had been drinking at the table had come up behind them, and was standing there holding out his hand. He was a hard and glittering creature, with his steely eyes bright among wrinkles that were there not because he was old but because his expression was contracted on too tight a spring, his nutcracker chin, hard and smooth as a metal-casting, his hair that was turning aluminium at the temple, his sporting suit that was the colour of an armoured car. At the sight of his smile they knew only the modified reassurance of those who come on a dangerous animal in one of its rare genial moods. Essington made no move towards taking his hand, so he raised the glass he was holding in his other with a hail-alligator-well-met expression, and said, ‘Ah, you don’t know me, Lord Essington, but I feel I know you. I’m Sir John Murphy. Jack Murphy to my friends, I hope, to you.’

He bowed extravagantly from the hips. ‘He talks Irish like we used to on the stage before the Irish players came,’ thought Sunflower. ‘I often think it was a pity they came. It was easier and what did it matter.’

He continued with pomp. ‘I feel warm things towards you, Lord Essington, for honour came to me at your hands. I received my baronetcy from the government of which you were a member.’

‘No, you didn’t.’ Essington’s voice had gone thin and high and polite, as it always did when he was going to be really rude.

‘Ah, but I did.’ He slapped his chest. ‘I’m Sir John Murphy, Jack Murphy to my friends. And your government gave me my baronetcy.’

Essington said, ‘No.’

‘Ah, but yes. You great men grow forgetful, you have so many—’

‘Didn’t you say you were Sir John Murphy?’

‘That’s who I—’

‘Of the firm of Murphy & Brace in the City?’

‘Yes, that’s—’

Essington gently shook his head. His voice had become a mild squeak. ‘Then you certainly didn’t get a baronetcy from any government of which I was a member.’ He wheeled about and faced the mantelpiece.

‘Ah, sure, you may be right!’ cried Sir John Murphy to his back, with undiminished cordiality. ‘Indeed, I know you’re right! You went out in the spring, and I got my baronetcy in the autumn! What a memory you’ve got!’ He threw back his head unnecessarily far, drained his glass, and exclaimed apparently without irony, ‘Now, I’ll always be flattered that although the men you’ve known who’ve got titles in the last few years must run into thousands, I might say millions, considering your great position, you remembered when I got my baronetcy.’ He pressed between Essington and Sunflower and tried to find a place for his empty glass between the vases on the mantelpiece, muttering contemptuously, ‘Flowers, flowers, Pitt is mad on flowers.’ It occurred to Sunflower that he spoke as if he did not like Francis Pitt. They could not be close friends, then. She was glad.