19

“Who wants a bath before supper?” asked Maria.

“Meaning you do,” said Niall, “and if anyone else says ‘Yes,’ there won’t be enough hot water.”

“That,” said Maria, “was what I intended to convey.”

We all three wandered into the hall. Celia switched off the lights in the drawing room. She left one lamp burning by the fireplace.

“Celia has spinster habits,” said Niall, “turning off lights, switching off fires. Knowing what to do with once-cooked food.”

“It has nothing to do with being a spinster,” said Celia. “It’s just the way I’m trained. Not even wartime measures. You forget I had an invalid to look after for three years.”

“I had not forgotten,” answered Niall. “I prefer not to think about it, that’s all.”

“You had those nurses to help you,” Maria said. “They always seemed very nice. It could not have been so very terrible.” She led the way upstairs.

“Who said it was terrible?” asked Celia. “I never did.”

The various rooms led onto the single corridor. At the far end was a door to the nursery wing.

“Pappy would never have cared for it down here,” said Maria. “Too much noise. I kept coming back from the theater to have babies. The noise was bad enough for me.”

“It depends on the sort of noise you mean,” said Niall, “bombs or babies. Personally, give me bombs every time.”

“I agree,” said Maria. “I was thinking of the babies.” She opened the door of her room, and turned on the light. “Anyway,” she said, “it was right for Pappy to die in London. He belonged to London, more than to any other city. And it was right that he died when he did. Before the world turned drab.”

“Who says it’s drab?” asked Niall.

“I do,” said Maria. “No brightness anymore, no life, no fun.” She opened her wardrobe door, and stared pensively inside.

“It’s our age group,” said Celia, “that’s really the matter. I don’t mind reaching mid-thirty, because it does not affect me much, one way or the other, but perhaps for you and Niall…”

“Nor me,” said Niall. “A person can sit staring at a piece of water with a vacant mind at eighty-five. Or sit on a bench and sleep. I’ve never wanted to do anything else.”

Through the door to the children’s wing came shouts of laughter.

“They’re being vulgar,” said Maria.

“That means Polly is downstairs,” said Niall.

“Perhaps I ought to go along and see?” said Celia.

Maria shrugged her shoulders. “I’m going to have my bath,” she called. “If I am late, tell Charles the reason why.” She shut the door.

Niall smiled at Celia. “Well?” he said. “It’s been a funny day.”

“We haven’t achieved anything, have we?” said Celia. “We’ve come to no conclusions. Perhaps it does not really help, delving into the past. Anyway, I feel the same now as I did then. Even if we are older. Even if the world has turned drab.”

“You look the same, too,” said Niall, “but perhaps you would, to me. That little gray streak has been in your hair for several years.”

“Don’t be late for supper,” said Celia. “It would be rather awful if I had to face Charles alone.”

“I won’t be late,” said Niall.

He went along to the spare room, whistling under his breath.

“We were very young, we were very merry,

We had ridden back and forth all night upon a ferry…”

Niall never knew why he remembered things. Why snatches of verse, and odd rhymes, and half-finished sentences spoken long ago by forgotten friends, should come to him like this at any moment of the day or night. As now, for instance, changing for supper in the spare room at Farthings. He threw off the tweed jacket and hung it on the bedpost. He kicked his heavy shoes into the corner and reached for the pair of American sneakers, then pulled a clean shirt out of his suitcase, and a spotted scarf. He had been too idle to pack a tie. Whenever he came to Farthings for the weekend he never bothered to unpack. It was so much simpler to leave his clothes—and he never brought many—folded in the suitcase, instead of tucked away in chests of drawers and wardrobes. This was one of the many things he had learned from Freada. “Carry what you can upon your back,” she used to say. “It all saves time and temper. Have no real possessions. Stake no claim. This is our home, for three, for two nights only. This studio, this lodging house, this unfamiliar room in a hotel.”

There had been many of them. Dingy ones, with no “eau courante,” no “salle de bain,” no “petit déjeuner,” and there, for a brief space, they had belonged. Then better ones, where the femme de chambre asked if she could “préparer le bain,” and it was always ten francs extra; but the water was steaming hot, and the towel very small, and there would be a bed with a monstrous pouffe affair balanced upon the top, embroidered with lace. Once they went a bust and took a suite in a palatial kind of palace in Auvergne, because Freada said she had to take a cure. Why, in the name of Jesus, did Freada have to take a cure?

She got up at eight in the morning and went off to drink the waters or have the waters poured upon her, Niall never really knew which; but he used to lie in bed until she returned in the middle of the day, and he read every one of the works of Maupassant, the book in one hand and a bar of chocolate in the other.

In the afternoon he used to make her climb a mountain. Poor Freada, her ankles always hurt, she hated walking. And he made up frightful scandals about the people staying in the hotel, telling her at meals. She used to kick him under the table and whisper, “Will you please be quiet? We shall be thrown out of here.” She pretended to look dignified, but spoiled the dignity by kicking her shoes off under the table, and never finding them again without a scuffle. Then there was that melancholy hotel at Fontainebleau where old maiden ladies stretched themselves upon chaises longues, and Niall had played the piano all day long until they had complained to “le patron.” It was the lady in the chaise longue furthest from the room where the piano stood who made the great complaint. The patron was so apologetic. “You see how it is, monsieur,” he said, with a charming smile, “but this lady who complains, she has strange notions of morality. To her, all dance music is immoral.”

“I agree with her,” said Niall. “It is immoral.”

“But the point is this, monsieur,” explained the patron, “the reason why madame complains of you, is not because of the immorality in itself; but because, so she tells me, you make immorality delicious.”

“We were very young, we were very merry,

We had ridden back and forth all night upon a ferry.”

Well, what was it, for God’s sake? Was it a verse in Punch? And why now, in the spare room at Farthings? Perhaps it was a fragment snatched from the queer hotch-potch of memories that had flooded in upon him all the day. The wet winter’s day, spent in Maria’s drawing room. Charles’s drawing room. It was not Maria’s house, nor Maria’s room. Farthings belonged to Charles. It had his stamp upon it. The dining room, with the regimental prints. The staircase, with the family portraits spared from Coldhammer. Even the drawing room, which by courtesy was allowed to be a woman’s room, had a sagging seat in the best armchair, which was Charles’s chair alone.

What did Charles think about, sitting there alone, every evening? Did he read those books upon the shelves? Did he gaze at that picture over the mantelpiece, the watercolor memento of that far-off Scottish honeymoon where he had thought to capture and to hold his elusive Mary Rose? There was a pipe by the side of Charles’s chair, and a tobacco jar, and a pile of magazines upon the narrow stool—Country Life, the Sporting and Dramatic, the Field, and old back numbers of the Farmers’ Weekly. What did he do with his life? What was his day? The estate office in the morning, the routine visit to Coldhammer which still stood empty, bleak and shuttered, never yet handed back from the Agricultural Committee that had seized upon it for the war. A drive into the market town, a meeting, or several meetings. Drainage schemes, Conservatives, Old Comrades, the church tower. Tea with the children, if he was home in time; Polly presiding with the teapot, and the weekly letter to Caroline at school.

Then what? Dinner in solitude. The empty sofa. No Maria to lie upon the sofa. But if she remembered, if she was doing nothing else, there would be that long-distance call from London when she got back to the flat from the theater. “Well? What sort of a day?” “So-so, rather busy.” His replies mainly “Yes” and “No,” while Maria chatted on, spinning out her minutes to ease her conscience. Niall knew. Niall had been too often in the room. Not Charles’s room. Maria’s…

Well, it was not his business. It had continued in this way for years, with the intervention of the war. Would it not continue to eternity? Or did there come a breaking-point?

Niall put on his other jacket, and tied his spotted scarf.

The breaking-point… A man, or a woman either, could take so much, could endure so much, up to a certain testing-time, and then… What was the answer? Perhaps there was no answer. Certainly, there was nothing he could do. Or was there?

It was an odd experience to be hurt by the pain of other people. And Charles had been near to breaking-point today. There was still the ritual of the Sunday supper. The day was not yet done. What was it Freada had said, once, with her great streak of common sense, her truth, her honesty? “I like that Charles. He is a good man. And she is going to make him suffer horribly.”

Niall, angry and irritated at the accusation, denied it hotly at the time.

“Why should she? She loves Charles very much.”

Freada had looked at him and smiled. And then she sighed, patting him on the shoulder.

“Your Maria love?” she said. “My poor boy, she doesn’t begin to know the meaning of the word. Nor do you.”

If Freada really believed that, it meant that Niall and Maria were shallow, without depth? It meant that their emotions were trivial, trifling things, carried to no purpose, shed without a cause? In a sense, he felt it could be true about Maria; but not about himself. Surely, not about himself? It was strangely insulting to be told that you knew nothing about love. Worse than to be accused of lack of humor. If you knew nothing about love, why were you unhappy for no reason? Why that waking in the small hours, with an unquiet spirit, fearful and afraid? Why the dragging despair because of a gray day, because of falling leaves, because of winter? And why the upswing of a riotous mood, the surging zest for folly, that came so swiftly, and went again too soon? All this he had hurled at the realistic Freada, as he sat upon a bed, drinking cognac out of a tooth-glass, angry, reproachful; while she combed her pale, dyed hair before the mirror and dropped ash upon the floor. “Oh, those feelings,” she said. “You don’t take any notice of those. They are due to glands.”

All right, then. Everything was due to glands. Laughter at midnight, the color in a crowd, the sun behind a hill, the smell of water. Shakespeare was glands, and Charlie Chaplin.

He had leaned forward excitedly, spilling the cognac; and a letter had fallen out of his pocket from Maria.

“The trouble for you,” said Freada, “was that the Almighty went adrift when He made both of you. You ought to have shared the same parents and been twins.”

Freada would have agreed with Charles about the parasites…

It was worth while sending a telegram to Freada out in Italy, where she had settled the last few years in that dreary villa on a lake, sending him picture postcards of blue skies and blossom which never materialized when he stayed with her, because it always rained; it was worth sending a telegram to Freada and asking, “Am I a parasite?” She would laugh her deep, indulgent laugh and answer, “Yes.”

Parasitic upon Freada once; until he had learned to walk alone and to do without her. Freada, tragicomic, like an unpruned willow waving in the breeze, pretending not to mind, shaking her handkerchief to him from the end of the long platform at the Gare du Nord, in a last gesture of farewell. He had returned to her less and less as the years passed; there had really been nothing to go for anymore.

The tragedy of life, thought Niall, brushing his hair with the ebony brush and too few bristles that Pappy had given him on his twenty-first birthday, was not that people died; but that they died to you. All people died to Niall, except Maria. Therefore Charles was right. I live and feed upon Maria, thought Niall, in her I have my being, I lie embedded deep in the guts of her, and I can’t escape because I don’t want to escape, ever… ever…

Which, when you came to think of it, had quite a Cole Porter touch to it.

Deep in the guts. But the errand boys who liked his tunes would not understand it when they whistled. Nor would the old lady in Fontainebleau who had accused him of making immorality delicious. Well, it was something. To have made immorality delicious to one old, slightly deaf French lady who had always hated dance music was, when all was said and done, no small achievement.

This, dear God, was his contribution to the universe. Take it or leave it. Not for Niall the joys of Paradise, perhaps; but at least not the pangs of Purgatory. A small place, possibly, outside the Golden Gates.

Someone from a newspaper had telephoned him the other day. “Mr. Delaney, we are running a series shortly in our paper, ‘What Success has done for Me.’ Can we have your contribution?” No, they could not have his contribution. All success had done for him was to make it impossible to pay his super-tax. “But what is your recipe, Mr. Delaney, for the short road to success?” Mr. Delaney had no recipe.

Success. Well, what did it mean, to him? Supposing he had answered the newspaper and spoken the truth? A song burning in his head for two days until he had written it down, when he was purged; when he was free again. Until the next pain came. And the performance was repeated. The disillusion came when the songs were plugged upon the air, moaned by crooners, whispered by wailing women, clanged by orchestras, hummed by housemaids; so that what had been once his little private pain became, to put it bluntly, everyone’s diarrhea. Which was cheapening, and intolerable. Negroes offered thousands for the rights to sing his songs. God! the checks that had rolled in from colored crooners. Too many checks, all in one year. Niall had to attend conferences in the City with hard-faced men round desks, all because of some little song that had come into his head one afternoon, when lying on his back in the sun. How to escape? Travel. He could always travel.

But where? And with whom? Besides, once he had bought a ticket, and found himself a ship, or a plane, there were still things like passports and the Customs, the anxiety of wondering who to tip and why. Take a house in Rio? But whom would he invite to stay? If he took a house in Rio the local inhabitants would call. The local inhabitants would invite him to dinner, and he would be forced to pack up and escape again. Mr. Delaney never dines; Mr. Delaney never plays bridge; Mr. Delaney does not care for racehorses, for yachts, for glamour girls. What in the name of thunder does Mr. Delaney care for? Damn all, and there you had it. What a waste of time it was to be a man of simple tastes. A shake down in London, a hut beside the sea. A leaky boat that always needed painting and which, if the truth be known, he could not sail. Turn his back upon the world, and give his money to the poor? His back was always turned upon the world, and the poor had most of his money, anyhow. It was always possible to become a monk. There would be peace inside a monastery. But what about all the other monks, and all the prayers? Vespers and Benediction. He would not mind wearing a robe and sandals and a broad straw hat, and taking a fork and digging in a garden; but the business of kneeling at 5 a.m. would get him down. And meditating on Christ’s wounds. Though, actually, he could meditate on anything. The Abbot, or whoever ran the monastery, would never know. He could lie in his little cell all day and meditate upon Maria. But if that was all he would achieve by going into a monastery, why not stay where he was? Ah! well—there was always tomorrow. Niall put his change in his pocket. The lucky threepenny bit, the stub of a pencil, the key of the car, the small St. Christopher. And one day, he thought, everything will be worthwhile, because I shall write a concerto which will fail.

It will be the failure of all time, but I shall not mind. It will take months and months of toil, and the labor pains will be intense, but that will be the whole point of the procedure. One day, the concerto…

The gong for supper sounded. Niall switched off the bedroom light. Down the passage from the nursery wing came the sound of Maria’s children, shouting and laughing.

“We were very young, we were very merry,

We had ridden back and forth all night upon a ferry.”

The question was, what now?