As I have said before, this is not an accurate account of a political campaign. I was out of the main stream, in a backwater where I only caught echoes of what went on. I was aware of an increasing sense of urgency, which seemed to be striking everyone but myself.
There were two last frenzied days of electioneering. Gabriel came in twice during the time for a drink. When he relaxed, he looked fagged out, his voice was hoarse with addressing open-air meetings, but though tired his vitality was unimpaired. He said very little to me, probably because he was saving both his voice and his energy.
He tossed off his drink and murmured, ‘What a hell of a life this is! The damn fool things you have to say to people. Serves ’em right that they’re governed the way they are.’
Teresa spent most of her time driving cars. The morning of Polling Day came with a gale driving in from the Atlantic. The wind howled and rain beat against the house.
Isabella dropped in early after breakfast. She wore a black mackintosh, her hair was wet, her eyes bright. An immense blue rosette was pinned to the mackintosh.
‘I’m driving people to the polls all day,’ she said. ‘So’s Rupert. I’ve suggested to Mrs Burt that she should come over and see you. Do you mind? You’ll be all alone, won’t you?’
I didn’t mind, though I had actually been quite contented at the prospect of a peaceful day with my books. I had had almost too much company lately.
For Isabella to show herself concerned about my solitary state seemed singularly unlike Isabella. It was as though she had suddenly shown signs of adopting her Aunt Agnes’s attitude towards me.
‘Love seems to be having a softening effect upon you, Isabella,’ I said disapprovingly. ‘Or did Lady Tressilian think of it?’
Isabella smiled.
‘Aunt Agnes wanted to come and sit with you herself,’ she said. ‘She thought it might be lonely for you and – what was it she said – that you might feel out of things.’
She looked at me inquiringly. It was an idea, I saw, that would not have entered her own head.
‘You don’t agree?’ I asked.
Isabella replied with her usual candour, ‘Well, you are out of things.’
‘Admirably true.’
‘I’m sorry if you mind about it, but I don’t see that Aunt Agnes coming and breathing over you would make it any better. It would only mean that she would be out of things, too.’
‘And I’m sure she would like to be in things.’
‘I suggested Mrs Burt coming because she’s got to keep out of the way anyway. And I thought you might talk to her, perhaps.’
‘Talk to her?’
‘Yes.’ A slight frown appeared on Isabella’s white forehead. ‘You see, I’m no good at – at talking to people. Or letting them talk to me. She goes on and on.’
‘Mrs Burt goes on and on?’
‘Yes, and it seems so senseless – but I can’t put things properly. I thought perhaps you could.’
‘What does she go on and on about?’
Isabella sat down on the arm of a chair. She spoke slowly, frowning a little, and giving a very good imitation of a traveller describing the more puzzling rites of some savage tribe.
‘About what happened. About rushing to Major Gabriel. About its being all her fault. That if he loses the election she will be to blame. That if only she’d been more careful to begin with – that she ought to have seen what it might lead to. That if she’d been nicer to James Burt and understood him better, he might never have drunk so much. That she blames herself dreadfully and that she lies awake at night worrying about it and wishing she’d acted differently. That if she’s injured Major Gabriel’s career she’ll never forgive herself as long as she lives. That nobody is to blame but her. That everything, always, has been her fault.’
Isabella stopped. She looked at me. She was presenting me, as it were, on a platter, something that was to her quite incomprehensible.
A faint echo from the past came to me. Jennifer, knitting her adorable brows and shouldering manfully the blame for what other people had done.
I had thought it one of Jennifer’s more lovable traits. Now, when Milly Burt was indulging in the same attitude, I saw that such a point of view might be distinctly irritating. Which, I reflected cynically, was the difference between thinking someone was a nice little woman, and being in love!
‘Well,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘I suppose she might very well feel that way. Don’t you?’
Isabella replied with one of her definite monosyllables.
‘No,’ she said.
‘But why not? Explain yourself.’
‘You know,’ said Isabella reproachfully, ‘that I can’t say things.’ She paused, frowned and then began to speak – rather doubtfully. She said, ‘Things either have happened, or they haven’t happened. I can see that you might worry beforehand –’
Even that, I could see, was not a really acceptable position to Isabella.
‘But to go on worrying now – oh, it’s as if you went for a walk in the fields and stepped in a cow pat. I mean, it wouldn’t be any use spending the whole of the walk talking about it, wishing you hadn’t stepped in the cow pat, that you’d gone another way, saying that it was all because you hadn’t been looking where you were stepping, and that you always did do silly things like that. After all, the cow pat’s there on your shoe – you can’t get away from it – but you needn’t have it in your mind as well! There’s everything else – the fields and the sky and the hedges and the person you’re walking with – they’re all there too. The only time you’ve got to think about the cow pat again is when you actually get home when you have to deal with your shoe. Then you do have to think about it –’
Extravagance in self-blame was an interesting field on which to speculate. I could see that it was something in which Milly Burt might indulge rather freely. But I didn’t really know why some people were more prone to it than others. Teresa had once implied that people like myself, who insisted on cheering people up, and putting things right, were not really being as helpful as they thought themselves. But that still didn’t touch the question of why human beings enjoyed exaggerating their responsibility for events.
Isabella said hopefully, ‘I thought you could talk to her?’
‘Supposing she likes – well, blaming herself,’ I said. ‘Why shouldn’t she?’
‘Because I think it makes it rather dreadful for him – for Major Gabriel. It must be very tiring having to go on and on assuring someone that it’s quite all right.’
It would undoubtedly, I thought to myself, be very tiring … It had been tiring, I remembered … Jennifer had always been excessively tiring. But Jennifer had also had a lovely sweep of blue-black hair, big sad grey eyes and the most adorable and ridiculous nose …
Possibly John Gabriel enjoyed Milly’s chestnut hair and soft brown eyes and didn’t mind assuring her that it was quite all right.
‘Has Mrs Burt any plans?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes. Grandmother has found her a post in Sussex, as a companion housekeeper to someone she knows. It will be quite well paid and very little work. And there is a good train service to London, so that she can go up and meet her friends.’
By friends, did Isabella, I wondered, mean Major John Gabriel? Milly was in love with Gabriel. I wondered if Gabriel was a little in love with her. I rather thought he might be. ‘She could divorce Mr Burt, I think,’ said Isabella. ‘Only divorce is expensive.’
She got up. ‘I must go now. You will talk to her, won’t you?’ She paused by the door. ‘Rupert and I are being married a week today,’ she said softly. ‘Do you think you could come to the church? The scouts could push you there if it’s a fine day.’
‘Would you like me to come?’
‘Yes, I would – very much.’
‘Then I will.’
‘Thank you. We shall have a week together before he goes back to Burma. But I don’t think the war will last very much longer, do you?’
‘Are you happy, Isabella?’ I asked gently.
She nodded.
‘It seems almost frightening – when a thing you’ve thought about for a long time really comes true … Rupert was there in my mind but getting so faint …’
She looked at me.
‘Even though it is all real – it doesn’t seem real yet. I still feel I might – wake up. It’s like a dream …’
She added very softly, ‘To have everything … Rupert … St Loo … all one’s wishes come true …’
Then, with a start, she cried, ‘I oughtn’t to have stayed so long. They gave me twenty minutes off for a cup of tea.’
I gathered that I had been Isabella’s cup of tea.
Milly Burt came over to see me in the afternoon. When she had struggled out of her mackintosh and pixie hood and galoshes, she smoothed her brown hair back and powdered her nose a little self-consciously and came to sit beside me. She was really, I thought, very pretty and also very nice. You couldn’t dislike Milly Burt even if you wanted to, and I, for one, didn’t want to.
‘I hope you don’t feel dreadfully neglected?’ she said. ‘Have you had lunch and everything all right?’
I assured her that my creature comforts had been attended to.
‘Later,’ I said, ‘we’ll have a cup of tea.’
‘That will be very nice.’ She moved restlessly. ‘Oh, Captain Norreys, you do think he’ll get in, don’t you?’
‘Too early to say.’
‘Oh, but I mean what do you think?’
‘I’m sure he stands a very good chance,’ I said soothingly.
‘It would have been a certainty but for me! How could I be so stupid – so wicked. Oh, Captain Norreys, I just think about it all the time. I blame myself dreadfully.’
Here we go, I thought.
‘I should stop thinking about it,’ I advised.
‘But how can I?’ Her large pathetic brown eyes opened wide.
‘By the exercise of self-control and will power,’ I said.
Milly looked highly sceptical and slightly disapproving.
‘I don’t feel I ought to take it lightly. Not when it’s been all my fault.’
‘My dear girl, your brooding over it won’t help Gabriel to get into Parliament.’
‘No-o, of course not … But I shall never forgive myself if I’ve injured his career.’
We argued on familiar lines. I had been through a lot of this with Jennifer. There was the difference that I was now arguing in cold blood, unaffected by the personal equation of romantic susceptibility. It was a big difference. I liked Milly Burt – but I found her quite infuriating.
‘For God’s sake,’ I exclaimed, ‘don’t make such a song and dance about it! For Gabriel’s sake if nobody else’s.’
‘But it’s for his sake I mind.’
‘Don’t you think the poor fellow has enough on his back without your adding a load of tears and remorse?’
‘But if he loses the election –’
‘If he loses the election (which he hasn’t lost yet) and if you’ve contributed to that result (which there is no means of knowing and which mayn’t be so at all) won’t it be disappointing enough for him to have lost the fight without having a remorseful woman piling her remorse on to make things worse?’
She looked bewildered and obstinate.
‘But I want to make up for what I’ve done.’
‘Probably you can’t. If you can, it will only be by managing to convince Gabriel that losing the election is a marvellous break for him, and that it has set him free for a much more interesting attack upon life.’
Milly Burt looked scared.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I could possibly do that.’
I didn’t think she could, either. A resourceful and unscrupulous woman could have done it. Teresa, if she had happened to care for John Gabriel, could have done it quite well.
Teresa’s method with life is, I think, ceaseless attack.
Milly Burt’s was, undoubtedly, ceaseless picturesque defeat. But then possibly John Gabriel liked picking up pieces and putting them together again. I had once liked that kind of thing myself.
‘You’re very fond of him, aren’t you?’ I asked.
Tears came into her brown eyes.
‘Oh, I am … I am indeed. He’s – I’ve never met anyone quite like him …’
I hadn’t met anyone like John Gabriel myself, not that it affected me as it did Milly Burt.
‘I’d do anything for him, Captain Norreys – I would indeed.’
‘If you care very much for him, that is something in itself. Just leave it at that.’
Who had said ‘Love ’em and leave ’em alone’? Some psychologist writing advice to mothers? But there was a lot of wisdom in it applied to others beside children. But can we, really, leave anybody alone? Our enemies, perhaps, by an effort. But those we love?
I desisted from what has been termed unprofitable speculation and rang the bell and ordered tea.
Over tea I talked determinedly of films I remembered from last year. Milly liked going to the pictures. She brought me up-to-date with descriptions of the latest masterpieces. It was all quite pleasant and I enjoyed it, and I was quite sorry when Milly left me.
The far-flung battle line returned at varying hours. They were weary and in differing moods of optimism and despair. Robert alone returned in normal and cheerful mood. He had found a fallen beech tree in a disused quarry and it had been exactly what his soul had been longing for. He had also had an unusually good lunch at a small pub. Subjects to paint and food are Robert’s main topics of conversation. And not at all bad topics, either.