The Flowering Thorn (29 page)

“Pat! My dear, I never asked. How is he?”

“Very well indeed,” said Lesley, still rather earnest in the defence of food. “I've left him at the Vicarage.”

“Darling! How perfectly sweet! Do you mean to say you've got all matey with the Vicar?”

“I've just been staying there, to look after the children,” said Lesley placidly. The jugged hare had arrived, looking extremely adequate: but fortunately Elissa, now furnished with her sole, was a very slow eater. She talked so much; she was talking so much now.…

And all through lunch, indeed, Elissa's high shrill voice chattered tirelessly on, marvelling at the Vicar, extolling her car, creating around them, as nothing else could have done, the sights and sounds of London at cocktail time: while all through lunch, obliquely in the Swan's silvery mirrors, Lesley scrutinised her friend.

Elissa—there was no doubt at all—had dressed very carefully indeed. Possibly it was the effect of her four years' exile, but Lesley felt she had never seen anything quite so smart as the trim little dark vermilion sports suit, the matching cap and gauntletted hogskin gloves. And as for her face—it would need a life-long experience of beauty-parlours to gauge exactly how many hours a week went to achieve its perfection. With a sudden sinking of the spirit, Lesley remembered that it was nearly three years since she had had her eyebrows plucked.

And meanwhile, from the other side of the table, a similar examination had been unobtrusively proceeding.

“But really, darling, I think you're looking very well. You've put on weight, of course”—Elissa's complacent glance flickered over her own mirrored slenderness—“but they say curves are going to be fashionable. Though they've said that for years, haven't they? Let's take our coffee in the other room.”

But after they had crossed the hall—the same hall in which Lesley had once been taken for a Country Type—conversation flagged. Even Elissa's flow seemed suddenly to slacken, for she had already dealt with dress, drama, art and personalities; and to be the next person to speak after Elissa always made anyone else feel a little dull. Or was that too—Lesley asked herself—simply another notion born of a four-years' absence? Surely in Town she herself, for instance, had talked every bit as fast, made just as many epigrams, and would have thought no more of capping Elissa's stories than of criticising her clothes? Only here, she lacked material. There was Pat, of course; but he, like all her other preoccupations—of cats and gardens and Mrs. Pomfret's aunt—was obviously far too commonplace to amuse.…

“God, but this fire's hot!” said Elissa suddenly. “If I don't move my face will run.” She pulled out a mirror, looked long and searchingly at the skin round her nostrils. “And now, darling”—the powder-box closed with a well-remembered snap—“tell me everything you've been doing for the last three years.”

“Nothing much,” said Lesley.

2

In the short silence a clock chimed in the hall. Elissa stirred.

“My dear, you really are rather marvellous,” she said; and held up her bag to save her complexion from the fire.

Lesley looked up inquiringly.

“About Pat. Living in the country. Giving up everything you enjoyed. I mean, I've sometimes felt like giving up everything myself, but not in that way. (Only last year,” threw out Elissa in parentheses, “I tried to go into a nunner; but they made difficulty after difficulty.) You know, my dear, we none of us ever expected you to stick it.”

Wrinkling her forehead, Lesley tried to think back to the time when living in the country was something one deserved credit for. For four years, to be sure, the thought of returning to Town had been constantly at the back of her mind; but that was not to say that they had been four years of unmitigated pain. Far from it, thought Lesley honestly: her memory suddenly selecting, as a random nosegay of favours, the herbaceous border, Pat shouting to Pincher, and Mrs. Pomfret's home-made cake. However, in Elissa's eyes she had apparently done something noble; and Elissa was not as a rule much given to praise.

“Oh, well,” said Lesley, as nobly as she knew how, “it's nearly over now. Pat goes to school in September, and then I shall be free again.”

With one of her long flickering glances Elissa again took in her friend's calm unpainted face, her unremarkable clothes, her general air of woman-no-longer-in-active-competition.…

“Darling! How nice it will be to have you back!” She spoke with sincerity: she felt she had never liked Lesley so much before. “I wonder if you could get your own flat again? Or there's a cottage to let in my mews—or lots of people are going to Chelsea—”

For half-an-hour more she babbled joyfully on, renting Lesley's new flat, hanging her new curtains, inviting her to Pont Street—as long as she liked, whenever she liked, and at a moment's notice—and in short forgetting all but the passage of time in a pure effusion of friendship. Then the clock struck, it was half-past three; and with a couple of fluttering kisses Elissa fled for her car.

A trifle more soberly, though with head still spinning from so much enthusiasm, Lesley followed across the square in the direction of the 'bus stop. Elissa would have loved to take her back, but there was a private view at four.

3

Returning a little wearied in the early dusk, Lesley saw Mr. Pomfret's black coat dark against her door. So he had stood all those years ago, just before disappearing from view by the simple expedient of slipping in at the front door and out the other side! But now he had evidently come to bring Pat, and she hastened forward to thank him.

“But you shouldn't have troubled,” she cried. “He always runs back alone unless it's really dark. Has the roller come yet?”

“Not yet,” said the Vicar.

And at once, at something in his voice, fear gripped her. Holding hard by the door-post, she said brusquely:

“Please don't try and prepare me. Has anything happened to Pat?”

With equal brusqueness the Vicar answered her.

“No, no. I'm sorry I frightened you. But it's bad news all the same. Sir Philip died this afternoon.”

For a moment Lesley stared at him in silence; until, moistening her lips with her tongue, she was surprised by a sudden taste of salt. She said,

“But—but there was nothing wrong with him. Only that chill.”

“He was seventy-five, and very frail. And—I'm afraid I've been deceiving you, my dear. He's been very ill all these weeks. Only he didn't want you, you see, to know that he was dying.
He
knew, I think, from the very beginning. And most of all, he didn't want you to see him die.”

Lesley nodded. Not to spoil it, not to leave the wrong memory! She could understand that. A thought struck her.

“Who looked after him?”

“A nurse from Aylesbury. I fetched her myself, with the doctor. It was pleurisy, and he … hadn't the strength.”

As though his words had released a flow of mechanical energy, Lesley rushed past him into the house, switched on the light, drew the blinds; until from close behind the Vicar's hand gripped her shoulder.

“Sit down,” he said, “sit down and cry. You look as though you're going to faint.”

“I don't think so,” said Lesley. She steadied her voice, so that it made a queer dull noise in her own ears. She said,

“You ought to have told me.”

Very gently, the Vicar forced her into a chair.

“My dear,” he said, “it was his one pride and consolation, that you should be spared all useless pain. He didn't call it pain, he called it ugliness. How could I have told you?”

Lesley moistened her lips.

“Isn't there—isn't there any message for me?”

“Yes. He sent you his love,” said the Vicar gently, “and said you were to cry a little, but not too much. And the other thing is—he's left you this cottage.”

CHAPTER TEN

Of all forms of property, freehold land (except of course in slum and other congested areas) demands most and gives least. Gives least, that is to say, in the matter of half-yearly dividends: for its profits are not of the kind that can be cleared through the bank for the benefit of an absentee landlord. They are for the most part, indeed, intangible, like those tenuous exports which should, but do not, redress the balance of trade: to describe them one must take refuge in comparisons, observing, for example, that though a share in British Celanese is a precious, an invaluable thing, one cannot watch it put forth grass; or that though Government Stock offers very good security, one has not to rise at six to see at its best. In diamonds, it is said, Jews find both commercial and æsthetic satisfaction; but even diamonds look the same at all four seasons. Land changes. It is brown in winter, green in spring: it supports—we speak of land, not House Property—three separate populations, the rooted, the ambulant, and the volatile. And to command these varied profits mere ownership is not enough: that is where the land demands. Unless the owner is there, on the spot, he loses all. For one cannot by proxy smell earth after rain, or hear a blackbird whistle; or set roots of cowslips in a wet green bank.

Lesley sat back on her heels (she had Pat's old prayermat, reinforced with waterproof) and broke the last of the earthy clumps into two equal parts. They had been dug that morning out of Horace Walpole's meadow, from a slope where the ground each April showed pale honey-gold; and the way to set them was to cut out a square of turf slightly smaller than the clump, then press apart the edges so that when the root had been inserted they would spring a little back and clip it in its place. Lesley had found this out for herself, and besides the delicious sensations at her finger-ends—the elasticity of the turf, the freshness of rain-wet—had thus the additional pleasure of putting into practice a theory recently acquired.

But her mind was not wholly on her work. It strayed, in an idle and desultory manner, from the theory of cowslip-planting to the theory of freehold land; being chiefly occupied with the odd mental phenomenon contained in this fact: that though cottage, land and apple-trees all remained exactly what they were a week ago—though the fact of her ownership obviously made no objective difference to any one of them—the idea of returning permanently to Baker Street was now no longer either desirable or not desirable, possible or not possible: it was simply out of the question.

‘I'll have to write to Elissa,' Lesley thought. Those daydreams at the Yellow Swan—how airy, how unreal! She fitted in the last root, felt the turf grip, and pressed down on either side till her palms were marked with a twig and a pebble. For the moment at any rate the problem was too much for her. And after all, why bother? The answer was there, however arrived at; and indeed from the moment brain and heart had recovered from their shock her first and still dominant emotion—stronger even than gratitude—was a feeling of immense simplification. Something had been settled for her; as though Sir Philip had reached out, with a last authoritative gesture, and put the young woman in her place.

2

That afternoon, under a lowering March sky, Lesley went up to the Hall for the first time since its master's death. Pat and Pincher accompanied her, but she left them on the terrace and went alone into the quiet house.

It was already dead. The clocks ticked, a fire burned on the library hearth: but in room after speckless room she instinctively hushed her step. The breath had left them: the light was out: and what a slender and flickering candle it had been that lit those lofty and succeeding rooms! Behind the green baize door of the butler's pantry a fat tallow dip was doubtless still burning; but where Lesley walked not a foot might have fallen for fifty years. In Sir Philip's big chair—how long since she had last seen him? Only a month?—the cushions lay freshly plumped; one looked for the red official cords, and a notice ‘Not to be sat in.' Lesley put out her hand as she had done only a month ago to smooth the immaculate pillows, and was suddenly aware that she could not see. Tears blurred her eyes and ran easily down her cheeks: a wholesome and simple grief that relieved and washed the heart. She thought,

‘I wish I had been here. Whatever he said, he may have wanted me really. Because we did love each other.' And with her hand on his chair Lesley tried to think that last thought again, very clearly and strongly, so that if Sir Philip were still within reach, he might hear and perhaps take pleasure. But though she stood receptive, no answering thought came back: the dead were gone, and left no echo.

On the lawn outside she found Pat and Pincher chasing birds in the dusk. They stopped when they saw her, and came back to the terrace; and from Pat's suddenly concentrated face she knew that he was going to ask questions.

“What did Sir Philip die of, Frewen?”

“He caught a chill, Pat, and he was very old.”

“How old?”

“Seventy-five.”

“That's
very
old, isn't it?” asked Pat anxiously.

Lesley nodded. A sudden memory made her voice uncertain. For that girl, Pat's mother, had been no more than twenty-four, both her own youth and her child's still almost untouched. And forgetful for a moment even of Sir Philip, Lesley turned away her head and wept again.

3

On their way back by road (for the field-paths were like glue after a two-days' rain) Patrick, who had been walking for some time in thoughtful silence, suddenly observed that the Pomfrets were having a potato roast.

“I should have thought it was too wet for bonfires,” said Lesley. “Won't they put it off?”

Pat shook his head.

“Alec's having it,” he explained, “to celebrate the battle of Hyderabad, and he's been keeping the wood and things dry under his bed. Can I take some potatoes?”

“How many?” asked Lesley automatically; for she had never forgotten the time when they took some burnt almonds till there were none left.