The Innocent Moon (41 page)

Phillip remained still: the implication was clear. They knew about him. Obviously this had been arranged. Perhaps Roger was resentful of their mother's interest in him. Of course: Sophy had told him that she hadn't seen Roger since the funeral of his father, just before she had taken away the rest of the family to Devon for a change of scenery; and for Sophy, though he had not fully realised it at the time, to find hope of renewal in—himself. Sophy had been twenty years younger than her husband, she had told him.

“There was a frightful bounder there, do you remember, Queenie? A fellow with a red beard who tried to get off with you, and when we didn't go in, asked you for your address? The sort of fellow who would try and borrow a fiver—probably been in Wormwood Scrubs, or somewhere——”

“Sounds like a friend of mine,” Phillip said. “Only Julian hadn't got a beard then. He only grew it when we were in Devon. And he's avoided ‘porridge', so far.”

Had Julian spoken in the pubs, and to Irene, about his own month in prison at the end of 1919? How else would they have found out? Anyway, it was obvious that Roger looked on him
as an adventurer after his mother's money. He would make an excuse to go away after the hunt ball.

“Do you have a conductor at the local hunt balls, can you tell me?” he said to Sophy. “You remember the Indian Army captain at the Tennis Tournament at Queensbridge last year? The one with the steel racquet? I saw him conducting the Felix Hotel band at Felixstowe one night after the Armistice, with a poker.”

“You're talking rather a lot,” said Sophy, as her hand touched his wrist delicately, while she gave him a tender, reassuring glance.

The General seemed to be withdrawn into himself, with his third whisky and soda. Phillip imagined that he felt lost now that he had retired from the Army. Most of the men of his generation must have died during the Retreat, or at the first battle of Ypres. He began to feel concern for the General. Sophy had told him that his only son had been killed in the last year of the war, and recently he had lost his wife. He wondered what his name was: when being introduced, he had not registered the surname. And his daughter had been only, “This is Cynthia.”

*

The ball was held in a house three quarters of an hour's drive away. Phillip rode in the Daimler with the General, his daughter, and Sophy; the four ‘young people' went in the Sunbeam. The long drive to the house was lit by Chinese lanterns hanging on lower branches of trees.

Inside the shining floor of the ballroom, with its portraits, Phillip said, “Thank you for giving me two dances, Annabelle. Of course, if you find anyone you prefer to dance with, you can cut mine.” He meant this in service to her, feeling that he was too old, too dull a companion; and so was not prepared for Annabelle's immediate response—she struck out his name on her programme with the little pencil attached to it by a red and brown tassel. “All right—I will!”

He had no idea of Annabelle's feelings; she had no idea of his wish to abash himself before her—to be chivalrous, to stand apart, he so much older; she so much younger and living in the light of her own heart; he in the dark of a world gone for ever, to be resurrected by a scent, a sound, a name. The smell of burning oak-log—or of a piece of deal wood on a sea-shore fire—genii of an entire division, of a square mile of the Ancre valley. He thought of the first lines of Owen's
Greater
Love
, one of a few poems in a slim volume given to him by his mother.

Annabelle stood, laughing, beside a blond young man who had asked for a dance: an almost disguised Annabelle, in a frock of white with the fashionable waist-line round the hips, and a pink rose-bud on her shoulder. Phillip sauntered up to her, unbuttoning the white kid glove on one hand.

“What, you again?” She was radiant.

“What I meant was that, for your sake, I hoped you would find someone better to dance with.”

“That's what I understood! I suppose you'll tell me next that you can't dance?”

“I'm not much good, I admit, but I can more or less waltz and do the fox-trot, but I don't know the pattern of the reels or the black bottom!”

“The black bottom isn't on the programme anyway!”

“Annabelle, don't you know that I——” He dared not go on.

“Well, finish what you were going to say!”

“You ought to know.”

“Know what? Hurry up, the band's starting, and I'm having the first dance with Brian Talbot. What were you going to say?”

“Oh, it doesn't matter.”

It was half-past nine; the band struck up
The
Merry
Widow
waltz. Standing against the wall, he watched Sir Claude, in whose home the dance was being held, leading his wife to the centre of the floor, while the other couples waited. He recognised the scarred pugilist face, seemingly a little too large for the slight but sturdy figure dressed in red claw-hammer tail-coat with dark brown facings, black silk knee breeches and stockings with silver-buckled shoes. When working for
The
Weekly
Courier
Phillip had been sent to interview that famous sportsman and swashbuckling baronet with the magnificent Norman name on his seventy-third birthday anniversary to get a message for modern youth. He could hear the gravelly voice now, “I ride at ten stun four, as I have for fifty years. I swim every mornin', winter and summer the year round. I dive from forty feet through the ice if there is any. I drink a bottle of port every night with m' dinner. Tell 'em to follow my example, and they'll live to be my age! And I can still use me mitts!” Whereupon he had squared up to Phillip and playfully pummel'd him in the ribs before taking
him into the house for a glass of milk. “You want to put on a couple of stun, young feller.”

Now he watched the old boy pushing his wife round the floor, and in imagination saw him wielding a double-handed sword as tall as himself at the battle of Hastings. Then Sophy passed with the General and said, “Why aren't you dancing?” and he said, “I'm so interested in watching the dancers!” Before they could come round again he went to the buffet in the next room for a glass of champagne—another—another. Colonel Kingsman, your health. Do you feel the roots of Picardy wheat in your brain? What speedwell has borrowed the blue of your eyes, for a fresh summer morning? Spectre, my dear friend, have you spent the farthing your father dropped in your grave, while the farewell volley was fired into the air? Father Aloysius, have you found your friend Grenfell yet? Is he cracking his stockwhip in the fields of heaven, or has his poetry taken him to the bands of Orion, with William Blake?

He made notes on the back of his programme, and moved to the ballroom, presenting himself with a bow to the General before leading Sophy on to the floor to the tune of
Look
for
the
Silver
Lining
.

“I thought you weren't going to ask me to dance with you,” she said, as they serpentined past and through black and red coats, cavalry heads with oiled hair parted in the middle and brushed back, trim moustaches, tall winged collars and starched bow-ties and the unroving eyes of gentlemen. Their partners wore long white gloves to their elbows, frocks of black and ivory, silver and gold
lamé
amidst the occasional paler hues of younger women's dresses. Here and there in the eddy moved a dowager like an old sea-trout which had survived many spawning seasons and now out of custom had arrived with a new run of more eager, agile fish: ruined faces proud under piled white hair adorned with diamond tiaras lancing sudden rays of blue and green and red—the pure diamond shock of the beauty of light, concentrated fire of earth's creation, precursor of the poetic soul of man.

“You're unusually silent for you, old man.”

“I'm taking it all in, Sophy. It's wonderful!”

“Is it your first hunt ball?”

He nodded, thinking this was the immemorial display of life, and was moved to tears.

“What's the matter, child?”

“I think I've got flu' coming on, Sophy.”

“The dancing will help you to sweat it out. But don't drink too much wine, will you, child?”

My brain arises with your wheat, my eyes stare with your flower, you have shown me eternity, Father Aloysius. Dear Jasper Kingsman, did you dance here with your lady? Willie, where are you—I know what you feel, cousin—‘the song should never be silent, the dance never still, the laugh should sound like water which runs for ever'. The spirit of this house reveals the dance of life behind the visual scene, the hope of beauty in the dream of life. Yet I know that the world of peace is also the world of war, all life and death is for the sharpening of the spirit—the pressures of stupendous molten layers of stone, upheaved, riven, roaring in vast conturbed tortures of flame produce the diamond, that poem to the truth of light——

“There's old Creepy, our host, dancing with my little Annabelle,” she whispered. “Come on, child, wake up!”

“Oh, I am so sorry——”

“You've had too much to drink, haven't you?”

“Perish the thought!” he replied, thinking of Julian.

They passed the hero dancing with Annabelle, her eyes shining, and when they had gone by she said, “He's game, isn't he?”

“I love him, Sophy.”

“He was supposed to be on his death-bed last week, but when they sent for a specialist from London he sat up and said, “What the hell are you doing here, Sawbones?”

Sophy laughed, flushing slightly at the direct use of this strong language, since she had been a well-brought-up young lady in the politer suburbs of Sheffield.

“It's wonderful, Sophy, how he keeps his weight down to ten-st'n four, year after year. Shouldn't be surprised if he was diving into the Blackwater at Goldhanger Creek this morning. He told me, when I visited him here three years ago, that he dived from forty feet,
and
through the ice!”

“Now really, Phillip, you are too old for that sort of thing—you let yourself down—by—well—fibbing, you know!”

“Everyone fibs, don't they? Roger at dinner, for example—did he and Queenie
really
lose their way to a dance, and end up at the hall of St. Sabinus, Wakenham?”

Sophy flushed deeply to her neck.

“Well, I expect they meant only to rag you, but it was rather naughty of them. How is your mother?” She repeated what she
had said in the summer, “She's a very sweet person, isn't she? You take after her, I think, if only you would allow yourself to be yourself.”

“
I
allow myself to be
myself
?” But not wanting to challenge her he resumed his mask of innocence. “Really, you know, I
did
come here, about two and a half years ago. I called on Sir Claude for a message for modern youth, on his seventy-third birthday.”

She laughed. “Really, what will you be saying next!”

“We had a bit of a sparring match, and he gave me a glass of milk,” he went on.

“You have too much imagination, my dear.”

“That's what Bloom, my editor, told me when he sacked me.”

“Oh, I see! You were a reporter then? Why didn't you tell me, instead of leading me on?”

To tease her further he said, “Do you think I ought to go and renew the acquaintance, after this dance?”

“I think that perhaps it would be better if you didn't, old man. He's probably seen hundreds of reporters, and can't possibly remember them all.”

She changed the subject. “How many dances are there on your programme?”

“None, so far.”

“Really, Phillip! No dances with Queenie and Annabelle? Or Cynthia? You really must remember your duties, you know! Now go and ask Cynthia, the poor child's very shy, and still rather upset by her only brother's death in the last year of the war. And you will be careful, won't you, what you say? Both she and Bay are rather lost, poor dears.”

He saw Sophy in a new light. If only she could lose her obsession about him, she and the General might hit it off properly, and marry——

“There's Cynthia over there, sitting by herself. It's awful to feel oneself a wallflower at one's first grown-up dance, you know.”

He led Sophy to the General and then went across to the daughter. “Miss Cynthia—I do apologise for not remembering your surname—your father is ‘General' to me, and ‘Bay' to Sophy and Queenie——”

“I'm Cynthia Gotley, Mr. Maddison.”

“May I have the next dance—if your programme isn't already filled up?”

“Oh, thank you. I'd love to!”

A voice in the band was singing, as they took the floor, the words of
When
it
'
s
night-time
in
Italy
it
'
s
Wednesday
over
here
.

“Do you hunt, Miss Gotley?”

“No, Mr. Maddison. I hack sometimes on Daddy's old charger, Robroy, but he's rising fifteen, and getting rather long in the tooth. Do you hunt? Oh, of course you do. How silly of me.” He could feel her trembling. She made an effort. “Quite good, the band, isn't it, Mr. Maddison?”

“Jolly. By the way, Miss Gotley—oh, no, one shouldn't ask questions!”

“Why not? Do please say what you were going to say.”

“The name Gotley is familiar. I had an adjutant of that name, in April 1918. He was hit going up from Vierstraat to Wytschaete, he was in the Royal Fusiliers, and attached to the 2nd Gaultshires.”

She seemed to go limp. He felt her fingers tightening on his arm. “Do you mind if we sit out?” she said. Her face was white.

They went into one of the rooms leading off the ballroom, looking like a study—yes, it was the room where Sir Claude had given him a glass of milk. There were the same photographs on the walls, and signed portraits of the King and Queen in large silver frames on a side table. They sat on a leather sofa. A wood fire burned brightly in the hearth.