Sunflower (23 page)

As it was, everything was falling flat, so flat.

She said timidly, ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like to go back to the house and be with them?’

Like a sulky child he answered, ‘Well, they seemed to be getting on quite well without me, didn’t they?’

She looked at him in surprise, and exclaimed, ‘Oh, but go on, you understand all that, don’t you?’

‘Understand what?’

‘Well, what I mean to say is, you do see, don’t you, what’s happening when Mr Hurrell seems to think you a bit fussy, when he’s glad to see other people? You know, it’s like this, you’re looking after him with special care because you know he won’t get well, but he doesn’t know he isn’t going to get well, so naturally he thinks you’re fussy, and it gets on his nerves. But you can’t do anything about it. The only thing you could do would be to stop giving him special care, and goodness knows you can’t do that. It’s just a price you have to pay for feeling like that about people. You see, I know, because Mother was like that. Just an hour before she died, she said to me and my sister, quite cross, “I could get to sleep if you girls would leave me alone and not sit gawking at me like that.” And we just had to go. But, mind you, it didn’t mean anything, not really. She thought the world of us girls. They don’t
mean
anything by it, really they don’t …’

He looked at her searchingly, ‘Do you think it’s that?’

‘Oh, I’m sure it is.’

He dropped his head and stared down on the stones. ‘I believe you’re right,’ he said, in a voice as childish as that in which he had made his original complaint. Then he repeated in a harder, more adult voice, more strongly tinged with an American accent, ‘I believe you’re right.’ It was as if faith that what she had said was true had given him the strength to test it by reason, and that he felt more at ease using the tool of reason. ‘Why, yes. I believe that’s what it is.’

‘Well, don’t worry about it any more,’ she murmured.

‘Oh, I won’t,’ he said, ‘I know your explanation’s true. It’s got the turn to it that means it’s true. I’ve made my money by backing tips that had the same turn to them. Well, well, that’s how it is. I must just put up with it. It’s part of what I have to do for my old man.’ He took some puffs at his cigar. ‘Thank God you’ve told me this. You see, I’d been thinking that maybe I’d been boring him all these years and that he’d been too good-natured to let me see it …’

‘Oh, it wouldn’t be that!’ she exclaimed in wonder. Didn’t he know that everybody would be bound to like him?

‘It might have been, it might have been,’ he said, with an air of scrupulous fairness. ‘Yes, I’m glad you talked to me about this, because you see I know nothing about death. All my life I’ve been an extraordinarily lucky man, in every way. And I’ve never lost anyone I’ve been fond of. My father and mother are still alive down at Bath, and all my brothers and sisters are kicking about somewhere. So I don’t know a thing about people who are dying. And one hasn’t got a lead. Death is one of those special occasions in your life when people are apt to have the same special needs, however different they may be in ordinary life, and though it keeps on happening again and again, yet nothing about it ever gets out, no one knows what those special needs are. Now, one realises when one’s having a love-affair with a woman that she’s apt to have this and that emotion because of the situation.’

She was shaken by a tremor of disgust. He spoke in a level, matter-of-fact tone, and there was certainly nothing coarse in his words, yet for a second she felt outraged as if he had said something indecent. But she realised that was mad and silly of her.

‘She may be jealous then, though at any other time she’d be fair-minded enough. But one knows all that the first time one needs the knowledge, because all the time love’s being talked about, love’s being written about. But no one talks about death, no one writes about it. We’re all afraid of it.’ His voice was desolate, his voice was shuddering. ‘So when the damned thing comes on us we blunder about anyhow … unless a friendly soul comes along and will take the trouble to look closely at a stranger’s troubles and read the right meaning of them.’ He spoke gravely, and evidently under the influence of deep feeling. For a little while he puffed at his cigar in silence; and then said, suddenly, ‘God bless you, Miss Fassendyll.’

She had always been sure that people did in real life behave just as they did in plays that were considered quite bad.

He muttered, ‘I believe I shall sleep tonight.’ It was a measure of his need for rest, she supposed, that when he spoke of it his voice was charged with gruff voluptuousness, as if he meditated indulgence in some rich food, some heady wine.

It was queer and lovely that anything she had said should have been useful to him; and it had really been useful, he was not merely being polite. The new placidity of his movements, the unctions of his speech, showed that he had been reconciled to life in the last few moments. It had been left to her stupidity to serve his need because what he said was true, nothing was written about death, nobody talked about it. That was because men did most of the writing, and nearly all the talk that was listened to, and they always avoided as subjects things that could not be altered by argument. It hadn’t been a man who had given her the idea why dying people get cross with those who cared for them most. She and Lily and Mabel had been sitting, very sad about it, in the kitchen, when someone had come in, someone wearing an apron, someone whose name she had forgotten or never knew, just a neighbour who had popped in to see what she could do, and she had explained it to them. Her own mother had been like that too. There had been lots of women who had come in to see them, during those last few days, women wearing aprons, with unimportant names, and had told them all sorts of things that had helped through that time.

It occurred to Sunflower, with a sense of having been sold into a desolate country, that since she had left Chiswick and moved into the centre of London nobody had told her anything that would have been of use to Francis Pitt in his trouble. She felt a sense of guilt about this, as if she had broken a tradition, had done something like moving out of her place during a church service. She couldn’t have helped being an actress, so far as she could see. It had just happened to her. But all the same it didn’t seem right she should be one; not really right. And she felt that possibly he might have done something wrong of the same indefinable sort in becoming a very rich man and a politician. That might account for the faint sense she got now and then that he was not perfectly good. They should neither of them have been standing in this formal and enclosed garden, the air of which was melancholy. They should have been somewhere else, cosy and less tidy.

Because of his grief she felt a bodily pain, a bruise over the heart. Through the darkness and behind him, so that certainly he could not see her, she moved her hand as if to stroke his stooping shoulders. She could not even say anything, lest she should seem to be making capital out of his sorrow, to be using it as an avenue to intimacy with him. In any case she was nearly paralysed by stage-fright. She felt as if everything she did or said when she was with this man had to be weighed on very delicate scales, and if it were too light he would turn away, and if it were too heavy he would stand by and be courteous and gloomily decide not to see her any more. It was lovely to be with him, but it was torturing, exhausting.

He was looking at her as he smoked. Evidently he thought that as there was only moonlight she would not be able to see that he was doing it. She could not bear that for long, so she put up her hand in front of her face on the pretence of smoothing her hair. At that he took the cigar from his mouth, and said, not at all casually, but as if a long train of thought were coming to the surface, ‘What was that play you acted in where you went to a man’s rooms at night, wrapped in a great silver cloak?’ He spoke gloatingly; his little hands greedily described the way the silver folds had fallen. ‘You made a most beautiful picture. I have never forgotten it. Can you remember what I mean?’

‘Why,’ she answered in a little, weak voice. ‘I don’t know which that would be, I’m sure I’ve acted in such a lot of plays. It must have been some years ago if I went to a man’s rooms at night. Nowadays all that happens before the curtain goes up, and it isn’t considered specially interesting …’ She found it difficult to speak to him, but not because she was feeling the boredom and embarrassment that usually came on her when people praised her beauty. Instead she was feeling as if this was the first time that anyone had ever praised her beauty. It was as if an utterly new thing were happening to her, and had taken away her breath. She murmured, ‘Oh, I think I know … That would be “The Nightingale”. It was by Mr John Richard Smith, and he’s ever so old, so those sort of things go on happening in his plays …’

‘Well, whether he’s old or not, he wrote a play that had one wonderfully lovely scene,’ pronounced Francis Pitt solemnly, shaking his head for emphasis, ‘a wonderfully lovely scene …’ He went on smoking with an air of rumination, till with an abrupt, twitching movement, as if his high spirits had suddenly flared up, he threw his cigar high in the air over the flowerbeds and exclaimed in a voice full of good humour, ‘My God, why did I bring you into this gloomy old garden where I come and have the dumps! I’ve lots of other things here I needn’t be ashamed of! Come and see my chestnut walk.’

He was indeed very happy, far happier than she could ever have thought he would be while this trouble was hanging over him. They had to walk quite a little way, through the passage in the yew hedge, across the gravel in front of the house, which was the colour of india-rubber in the moonlight and had coarse blunt edges to all its copings and angles like the edges of hot water bottles, and up a winding path through a shrubbery of all those plants whose leaves set out to be shiny and are dull, laurel and rhododendra, but his mood held. He moved lightly and springily on his little feet and made broken, grunting, satisfied noises, and sometimes whistled tunelessly and exultantly through his teeth.

At the last turn of the path he stopped and said proudly, ‘Now!’

They were at the end of an avenue of chestnut trees, that drove along a flat terrace on the hillside to something too distant for anything to be known of it in this light save that it was high, and white, and stamped with the mould of human fancy: a statue, a fountain. Wide bays of brightness scalloped the pathway, for there were but half the number of trees on the valley side that there were on the side of the rising ground, so that at her elbow were wide windows of landscape, a landscape of vague radiant woods that seemed to be adhering to hills sticky with moonlight in the manner of treacle-caught moths, and of sky, the dark sky that is always a little strange to human eyes, since though it is more lawless than the land with its unmarshalled, moving clouds, it is by night more formal, pricked out with the patterns of the hard stars. There were floating here and there silver vapours that might have been passing over the world on some alchemic task of making beauty of what was not, a changing the character of what was beautiful to something rarer. The hideous house below them now served the eye, for its slate roofs looked like shining waters; and the candles on the unpartnered chestnut trees, lit by the full light of the moon, which the fine matt surface of the petals did not reflect, seemed to have the short, crumbling texture of snow.

‘Oh, it is lovely!’ breathed Sunflower.

He was innocently pleased, he was childishly proud of his possessions. ‘Ah, you must come and see it by day! It’s a fine view over to Harrow, and the candles on my chestnuts are at their best. Pink and white they are, the flowers we’re walking on.’ He ploughed them up with his feet, whistling as if it gave him a sense of luxury to be treading on fallen flowers.

‘I love them when they’re mixed,’ said Sunflower. ‘There was an avenue of them in a park where I lived when I was little. Strawberries and cream, we used to call the flowers on the ground.’

With gleeful, generous inconsequence he asked, ‘Do you like strawberries and cream? We might have had some tonight. My gardener forces them in some corner hereabouts, though God knows I have to go on my knees to get some of what I pay him to grow on my land with my money. But it’s a pity we didn’t have some for you tonight.’

‘It’s awfully kind of you, but they’re no good to me, ever. I like them, but they don’t like me—’

She bit her lip. This was one of the phrases that drove Essington into a frenzy. But Francis Pitt seemed not to be offended by it, for he went on happily, as if to talk of trivial things were a holiday. ‘Mm. Now I loathe asparagus, and we’re in the thick of the season now. How I hate those weeks every year when I have to sit in front of a plate that’s stocked with that anaemic, water-logged timber …’ No, he hadn’t minded her being common. It was a rest to be with a man who wasn’t porcupinish with different subtle sorts of fastidiousness. One could tell him anything. She remembered suddenly something that had been a lump in her throat ever since the morning because she couldn’t get it out of her system by telling somebody. In the automobile coming there she had felt quite sick because she didn’t dare say anything about it to Essington. She wondered if she could possibly tell Francis Pitt.

She paused, and stood looking over the moonlit landscape. He checked his walk and came to a halt beside her and asked, ‘Not cold, are you?’ with so obvious a desire to do everything he could for her, that she felt a rush of confidence, and began penitently, ‘I did make such a silly of myself today.’

‘How was that?’

‘Well, you see, I’m rehearsing a new play of Mr Trentham’s just now, and I’m playing a person who isn’t very well educated, not quite what you’d call a lady, really. Well, in the first act I have to say, “My husband’s uncle’s got mines in the Andes, not that I know where that is, I never was good at geography.” Well, that’s how I’ve always said it till today. But this morning Mr Childs, who’s our producer, stopped me while I was saying the line and said, “Miss Fassendyll, if I were you I should say Jography.” Well, naturally, when he said that, I thought I’d been saying it wrong and that it ought to
be
Jography. Well, I’m not the sort of person who pretends to know more than I do and never have, so I said, “Thank you very much, Mr Childs, and I’m sure I’m very sorry but I always thought it was Geography.” Well, you could have heard a pin drop, and then they all laughed, and what’s worse, they all stopped themselves. Well, wasn’t it awful of me?’