To the North (13 page)

The lunch was excellent. Even with all its leaves out, the table, designed for parties, was very large. Light caught the damask’s involved pattern of roses and pheasants, and six sprays of early sweet peas, arranged by the butler, sprouted out of a small silver vase.

“Emmeline will have told you about our few days at Farraways,” Lady Waters said to her niece.

Emmeline, coming back placid and shining, had said almost nothing, and Cecilia, knowing Emmeline could not be amusing about people, had not asked. She had understood there had been more of Georgina’s “cases” and that no one talked about her… . “Of course,” said Cecilia blandly.

“It was a quiet weekend,” said her aunt, “but sunny and peaceful. I hope, however, that Emmeline was not bored?”

“No, I think she loved it.”

“I think Emmeline’s wonderful,” Gerda said with a sigh. “We had some lovely long talks.”

“Oh, yes?” said Cecilia, who did not believe this possible.

“She’s so understanding.”

“She is when she listens.”

“Cecilia,” said Lady Waters, “underrates Emmeline.”

“Yes,” said Cecilia placidly.

“But,” their hostess said, affectionately reproachful, “Gerda did not care for my poor Tim.”

“Oh, I never said
that
, Lady Waters! I just said he hadn’t much self-control.”

“He was not at his best, naturally.”

“Why?” said Cecilia, helping herself to a cutlet.

“He has broken off his engagement—surely Emmeline told you?”

“But, Georgina, what an extraordinary thing to do!”

This was just what Sir Robert had said, when at last he had got the facts right. He had begun to say, with some vigour, hard things about having had poor Tim under his roof at all, till he recollected the roof was Georgina’s. “You take a conventional view of life, Cecilia,” said Lady Waters. There was a silence heavy with disagreement. “Tim,” she added, “is sensitive, and he behaved with real courage.”

“Young men may
do
these things,” said Cecilia, “but need they discuss them?”

“Anything,” Gerda said with a sigh, “must be better than the wrong marriage… . All the same,” she went on with her little privileged air, “I really do think he made rather a fuss. His feelings were not out of sight for one single moment. I suppose unhappiness takes people different ways. However unhappy I may be, I hate to attract attention… . But I thought you were wonderful with him, Lady Waters.”

“Tim
who
? said Cecilia suddenly.

Fond as she was of Gerda, Lady Waters could not help regretting, while on the subject of feeling, this opportunity to bring herself up to date with Cecilia’s affairs. Cecilia, with fleeting half-looks in her aunt’s direction and small interrupted movements as though to speak, flirted heartlessly with this curiosity. Gerda’s candid eyes never leaving them, Lady Waters again and again felt herself checked. When Cecilia, making a rapid gesture, upset her wineglass, Lady Waters observed, while the butler was still mopping: “You certainly are not yourself to-day.”

“I so seldom am,” said Cecilia.

Looking large-eyed round the sweet peas, Gerda appeared to ask what Cecilia might be like when she was herself. Aware, as lunch proceeded, of losing ground a little with Lady Waters, Gerda found herself wishing Cecilia had not come. Eiderdowns having made talk impossible during the morning, Gerda had still a good deal more about Gilbert to tell her friend.

“You are doing too much,” Lady Waters went on.

“Nerves,” said Cecilia modestly.

“You smoke far too much.”

“Perhaps it is simply that.”

They both knew it was not. This Monday morning Cecilia was, as a matter of fact, decidedly overwrought. Besides the agonies of decision—green, white or flame-colour?—she could never order a new evening dress without a sense of fatality: how much would have happened before it was worn out? … On Saturday there had been that disturbing passage with Julian: when she came in, desiring only a hot bath and introspection, she had had to dress at once and go out to a dinner party. Social activity right on top of a crisis had the same effect on Cecilia nervously as, on her inside, exercise taken too soon after a meal: undigested experience hung heavily on her spirit. She had stayed in bed, restless, all Sunday morning—was this a touch of heart or a touch of liver?—and saw provokingly little of Emmeline, out all day: later some friends had come in to talk in the garden and stayed too long.

“I think,” she said, after a longish pause and some salad, “I shall really go to America.”

“Nonsense, my dear,” said her aunt, having heard this before. She did not think that Cecilia would care for a country where no one had heard of her, and also knew well that Cecilia’s mother (her own sister-in-law by her first marriage) had intended the invitation rhetorically and might be considerably put out by Cecilia’s arrival. On the first point she was wrong: Cecilia, a social Columbus, could have asked nothing better than a continent-full of strangers, and knew well how to build up a rumour in a day.

“—Oh, dear child,” Lady Waters continued, turning to Gerda, “remind me that I want you to do a little telephoning for me after lunch: it would be such a help.”

Poor Gerda realised that this was her conge. “I will indeed,” she replied. “And, if you don’t mind, at the same time I’ll just ring up Nannie, to see that the babies are all right.”

“Surely,” said Lady Waters, surprised, “you have no reason to think they are not?” She did not care much for babies once they were born: also this was quite a new development in her Gerda, who had spent long days at Rutland Gate without anxiety.

“Oh,” said Cecilia swiftly, “have you got babies? Twins?” Her look expressed some surprise that Gerda had not got the children somewhere about her: Cecilia’s ideas of maternal devotion were most exacting. “I suppose,” she said, “you have a very good nurse?”

“Nannie is wonderful. All the same, I do have to try so hard not to be fussy.”

“Gerda,” said Lady Waters, “is quite right.”

“I know,” said Cecilia, “if
I
had any children I should always imagine they were on fire or being choked. But I daresay I am hysterical.”

Gerda gazed unhappily into her cup of gooseberry fool. She was thankful when lunch was over. If only all Lady Waters’ relations had been like Emmeline… .

“You are very naughty, Cecilia,” said Lady Waters, when they were back in the drawing-room and Gerda with a long list of messages, hastily improvised, had been sent off to telephone in the study. “You are not nice to my Gerda.” Time, however, was short. “Now tell me,” she said, settling comfortably in her chair, hands crossed, “whom you have been seeing?”

“Oh, everyone,” said Cecilia happily.

Lady Waters took a bold line. “Emmeline,” she observed, “does
not
seem to care much for that friend of yours, Mr. Linkwater. Her manner rather impressed me: I think a good deal of Emmeline’s judgment.”

“Markie? Oh no, Emmeline hates him. But that doesn’t matter, Georgina; he and I never meet.”

“You would not call a man Tommie or Bert or Alf,” said her aunt distastefully, “why should you call him ‘Markie’?”

“Everyone does: it’s written all over his cigarette case. He’s really a frightful young man,” said Cecilia blithely. “However, I don’t call him anything nowadays.”

Lady Waters, dissatisfied, looking broodingly at her niece, could best have summarised a cosmic and ravenous curiosity by asking: “Then whom are you calling what?” For evidently there was someone. These bright eyes, the air of a spring bubbling, this capriciousness, of a woman who has been found charming, even to-day’s nervosity were impossible to misread. If Cecilia did not love, she was loved. Besides, Lady Waters knew she had evening dresses enough for the social cycle: if she needed a new one she must be seeing someone too often. Regarding Cecilia more kindly, as one regards an oyster soon to be opened, or an engaging new novel certain to entertain, she hesitated between other lines of approach, while Cecilia, smiling and not unconscious, looked down at her pretty hands.

“You know,” said her aunt, “I am sometimes anxious about you.

“Oh dear, Georgina, why?”

“You are still quite young.”

“Well, I always hope so.”

“You are, and you have a very open generous nature and quick sympathies: I dread sometimes your being imposed upon.”

Cecilia, feeling, as always at the outset of these encounters, like someone exposing her palm for sixpence at a bazaar to the vicar’s wife disguised as a gypsy queen, objected: “I don’t think I really should be, Georgina: I’m quite selfish.”

“You have an emotional nature.”

“I like being susceptible.”

“Emmeline,” said Georgina, closing in swiftly, “seemed to be anxious about you. I could see she had something on her mind.”

“If she thinks it’s Markie she’s frightfully out of date,” said Cecilia rashly. “But I don’t think she’d be so stupid.”

“Indeed,” remarked Lady Waters, without expression.

“Not that poor Markie wasn’t respectable: he wouldn’t pick one’s pocket. But all my friends now are so very respectable: they take me to see girls’ schools.”

“Dear me,” said her aunt, “are they widowers?”

“No, they have nieces.”

“
I
see,” said Georgina, with ominous calm.

Cecilia began to wish she had lunched at Woollands. Dreading her own discursiveness she found she had come to a point where she must either talk about Julian or go. With Henry, Emmeline, with Georgina even, it had been always the same: it all had to come out. Emmeline’s detachment, Georgina’s cavernous receptivity alike provoked her to volubility. With delight pursuing the butterfly-shadow of feeling, Cecilia liked far too well to discuss her fancies. Sir Robert’s white wine, then this dark-red drawing-room had slain their thousands: this magnetic gaze of Georgina’s went straight to Cecilia’s head. Here even Henry had wavered, inventing when he had no more to confide… . Scenes flashed, words danced through Cecilia’s brain; her relations with Julian appeared more and more remarkable.

Only one fact deterred her—Julian’s appalling eligibility: she could discuss her heart but not her prospects. For all her sibylline grandeur, Georgina remained an aunt: one could but dread her approval. She would track Julian down, sum him up, invite him to dinner—or worse, to tea.

Lady Waters, with whom nothing sifted through to oblivion, had every common noun filed for reference and cross-indexed. The obscurest connections were not overlooked by her, mention of objects as innocent as grouse or a bicycle started a bell ringing: small talk offered little retreat from her perspicacity. “Nieces,” she said. “It’s curious how I am always hearing of nieces …” She paused: uneasy, Cecilia heard the filing-cabinet click open. “That friend and client of Emmeline’s, that Mr. Tower, a tall man I met in her office,
he
had a niece, I remember. He and Emmeline were talking of schools in Switzerland: I thought she seemed quite animated. ‘Why, Emmeline,’ I said, ‘I had no idea you were an education bureau!’”

“Animated?—Oh no, not possibly. Julian bores Emmeline: they never meet.”

“Then no doubt it was as a friend of yours” her aunt said smoothly, “that she had sent him circulars—”

Gerda edged, breathlessly, round the door. “Only me,” she said, and sank with a puff of billowing skirts into the white fur rug at her patron’s feet. “I’ve had such a time; you must have thought I was lost! It made that buzzing, gone-away noise at me every number I dialled: you know how a telephone makes one feel, Lady Waters, quite in disgrace! But I got all your messages right, I think.”

“Thank you, Gerda.”

“Lady Zweibacher didn’t seem to like my little squeaky voice: she kept asking for you. ‘Lady Waters is engaged,’ I said, ‘she can’t come to the telephone.’ I was right, wasn’t I?”

“You were quite right, Gerda,” said Lady Waters.

“There goes that cat,” thought Cecilia gloomily, “well away.” The topic, now open to discussion, would not be easily dropped. Though alarmed she was not, however, entirely sorry.

“OUR ACCOUNTS BALANCE,” said Emmeline, after nearly two hours of silence at Woburn Place. They had sent their secretary out for the afternoon; she had said she feared accounts were not in her line, as she read English at Oxford, and her presence made Emmeline nervous while adding up. Peter Lewis preferred to call their secretary “the stenographer,” the word brisked him up with its ring of efficiency and things went more slickly, as in a film of American office life. The stenographer got fewer personal calls nowadays and had begun to look gloomy: though it was a relief not having her sprawling to telephone over Emmeline’s roll-top they now feared they might have her with them for always.

Peter, who had been tiptoeing round the room cracking his finger joints, opening and shutting things in an agony of suspense—he had no head for figures either—cleared his throat and said: “Then you mean we are all right?”

“Yes. In fact we are six pounds seven and nine to the good that I cannot account for.”

“You don’t think we should have an auditor?”

“Not while things are going so well.”

“What a good thing people have to pay cash down for this sort of thing,” Peter remarked happily. “One of my friends has just gone bankrupt over a bookshop: all his friends came and he couldn’t bear dunning them.”

“Oh dear,” said Emmeline. “What’s become of him?”

“He’s living with me till we can think of something for him to do. Of course I’ve got no pistols or anything in my rooms, and there’s nothing that one could hang from, but I see him look at the gas fire every night when I put it out.”

“He can’t type, can he?”

“Not at all well. Anyhow I don’t think I should like to have him about here; he rather rattles me.”

Emmeline, wondering what one could do, sat looking unhappy till Peter suggested they might make tea. “Of course,” she said thoughtfully, watching the kettle boil, “if we did run this place on credit we could make anybody go anywhere. But I don’t think it would do.”

“It would be madness,” said Peter firmly; she had to agree.

Business recently had been brisk, Emmeline’s fervour and Peter’s determination to talk shop everywhere having attracted a good many clients, a number of whom remained. Their propaganda was simple: on her return from Farraways Emmeline had sent off circulars to the Blighs, Tim Farquharson and the vicar she met at tea. She received newcomers with sympathy, even with tenderness, while Peter’s air of according unwilling respect to a client’s intelligence was highly flattering. If they were not always efficient (in the most exacting sense) they were solicitous; their two charming grave young faces turned his way gave any client a sense of his own uniqueness; their rather high rate of commission was justified by a personal touch freshly and delicately applied. Arriving at one’s destination one found a postcard, stamped with the office slogan, wishing one every pleasure. Markie swore he had met a client who having bribed and fought her way to Belgrade on the wrong ticket found her hotel room full of roses ordered by Emmeline. They were persuasive: one went in wishing to paddle from Heyst sands and came out with bookings to Stockholm to see the architecture. Tourists viewing without passion the abstract purities of distant provincial towns to which she had sent them could feel sure that in Bloomsbury Emmeline would passionately be estimating their reactions. A gentleman from the north who, after a frightful fortnight in Silesia (which he had expected to find at the toe of Italy, full of orchestras), went in to wreck the office, was found with a large handkerchief, beseeching Emmeline not to cry. “There, there,” he said, “a girl like you’s not fit for this sort of life.” She had not wept: he had mistaken the blink behind her spectacles.