The Little Willow

The first evening, Simon Byrne was brought to the house by a friend of Charlotte’s, one of those with whom she would have to settle an account after the war—unless, of course, he didn’t come back. The stranger stood on the threshold and took in the room, and a look of such extraordinary delight came over his face that the youngest Miss Avery’s heart gave a little leap, almost as if, independently of her mind and will, it greeted of its own accord another of its kind.

It was, of course, a peculiarly gracious room, with its high ceiling and Adam chimney piece. The shiny white walls were painted with light and dim reflections of colours, and a thick black hearthrug smudged with curly pink roses—an incongruous Balkan peasant rug in that chaste room—somehow struck a note of innocence and gaiety, like the scherzo in a symphony. That rug, and the photographs on the lid of the grand piano; the untidy stack of books on a table; and a smoky pseudo old master over the fireplace, with the lily of the Annunciation as a highlight, a pale question mark in the gloom, gave the room an oddly dramatic quality. Lisby had often thought—‘It is like a room on the stage, in which the story of three sisters is about to unfold.’

The passing reflections of Charlotte in red, Brenda in green made a faint shimmer on the walls as they drifted about, as if a herbaceous border were reflected momentarily in water.

‘Charlotte dear, I’ve brought a friend. He was at Tobruk. Comes from South Africa, and doesn’t know a soul over here,’ said Stephen Elyot. ‘He’s just out of hospital.’

‘I am so glad!’ said Charlotte glowingly, giving him both her hands. ‘You must come as often as you like.’

His eyes dwelt on her dark, lovely face, and he said, ‘You don’t know what it feels like to be in a drawing-­room again.’

‘I can very well imagine. It must feel like the peace of God,’ said Brenda, in that soft, plangent voice of hers, which was so perfect an instrument for the inspired remarks that seemed to fall effortlessly from her lips.

She could say the most divinely right things without a throb of real sympathy, and would spend pounds on roses rather than write a letter of condolence. As for her ’cello playing, it was strange how deeply she could move one, while she herself remained quite aloof. It was because she knew what the music was meant to say and was thinking about the music all the time, and not of how she played or how she felt. It was a great charm in her.

Lisby said nothing. She had no poetic conception of herself to impose on the minds of others. However, she had her uses. She cut the sandwiches and made the coffee and threw herself into the breach when some unassuming guest seemed in danger of being neglected. And unassuming guests often were. Charlotte and Brenda had such brilliant friends—musicians and artists and writers. The truest thing about those girls was that they were charmers. Every other fact sank into insignificance beside that one supreme quality. Though each had her own strongly marked individuality, they had this in common: that by lamplight they acquired, in their trailing dresses, a timeless look, as if they might have stood for types of the seductive woman in any age. Not a modern girl; but the delicate creature who through the ages has been man’s rose of beauty, or his cup of hemlock.

Always, destroying friendship, there was this allure—the glow, the fragrance, the what-­you-­will, which, sooner or later, ensnared every young man and made him the captive of one or the other of the two elder Misses Avery.

‘Charlotte dear,’ said Stephen Elyot, wandering about the room with his coffee cup in his hand, ‘I wonder, with your exquisite taste, you let that picture hang there! It’s all wrong, my dear, as I’ve told you before. A Watteau, now, or a Fragonard, for this eighteenth-­century room. And yet your décors for the stage are so perfect! You are quite my favourite designer.’

‘Lisby would die if we banished the picture. It’s been in the family for generations,’ said Charlotte.

‘It has been loved by people who are dead, for its . . . holiness, not for aesthetic reasons; and that makes it spiritually precious,’ Simon Byrne said in a low voice to Lisby, by whom he chanced to be sitting.

She gave a little start. The thick white paint of the lily, and its golden tongue, had fascinated her as a child, making all lilies seem not quite earthly flowers. How did he know so quickly that the dark picture in the white room brought spiritual values into it, brought her mother saying, ‘Yes, darling; perhaps the angel has a queer face—perhaps he is a little bit like Miss Nettleton. How interesting that someone we know should have a face that an old master chose for the Angel Gabriel! I shall always think of Miss Nettleton as a very special kind of person.’

‘It almost seems as if he might be my kind of person,’ she thought. Perhaps one would have thought his face unremarkable if one had not caught that look on it. ‘He has known horror and violence, and is terribly vulnerable to beauty,’ she had said to herself, with one of her flashes of insight.

Brenda played that evening, and Simon Byrne never took his eyes off her. In her long green dress, with her gold hair like an inverted sheaf of corn, she held him spellbound. Or perhaps it was the music.

When she went to bed that night, Lisby caught herself hoping quite desperately that it was, after all, the music; and for such a foolish reason. Because as he was leaving he took her little willow tree in his long thin hands.

‘So cool,’ he said, ‘and watery. Willows and water—I used to dream of them.’

‘In the desert?’ she asked.

‘When I was lost,’ he said, ‘and parched with thirst, and terribly frightened.’

‘It’s the loveliest thing I have,’ she said.

It was made of jade and crystal and it stood on the lacquer cabinet in the hall. She had fallen in love with it in an antique shop and had expended on it, with wild extravagance, her first term’s salary as a teacher. Charlotte and Brenda had thought her too utterly feckless—almost wicked. The sun by day and the moon by night made it throw a lovely shadow on the wall. She couldn’t explain that what she loved was the idea of a willow that had been in the mind of the Chinese artist—the glitter and coolness and bewitchment. But he would know.

He came several times. ‘Naturally,’ thought Lisby, ‘one would like the house, wouldn’t one? Its oldness and peace.’ And Charlotte arranged the flowers so beautifully and there were music and conversation: Brenda and her friends practising their quartets for concerts and Charlotte’s friends talking of art. Anyone could come to the Court House as a place in which to forget the war. There was the strangeness of its being so near London and yet completely hidden in a wood, an oasis in the desert of ribbon development that had spread around it in the past few years. Many young men on leave found it a place of refuge.

He was a person one could talk to. The things that made Lisby laugh made him laugh too. Sometimes he would catch her eye and they would go off into a silent fit of laughter at some absurd thing that no one else had remarked. She knew, once or twice, the strange feeling of strings being plucked in her mind by a chance word or gesture of his, and he had a way of humming some tune that had been haunting her, even something she had not heard for a long time: a phrase from a symphony, perhaps, that had suddenly come back to her quite distinctly between sleeping and waking, as if a record had been put on in her mind.

And then, one day, Brenda, in her delicate way, appropriated his friendship. A person versed in Brenda-­ish modes of behaviour could guess what she thought. When she said charming things a little frostily, as if offering an ice-­chilled gardenia, when she smiled with dazzling sweetness one moment and raised her eyebrows rather coldly the next, one knew what was in her mind. She was dealing with a situation that required delicacy and tact. Love was sacred, even unwanted love. The little flame must not be allowed to go out. So one blew on it prettily one moment, and damped it down the next. For a conflagration meant the end of everything, it meant stamping on the heart in which it burned. And how, in wartime, could one bear to do that?

She said, ‘You know, Simon is rather an intriguing person. He can say rather divine things—when one is alone with him. Still waters, my dear, run deep.’

Yes. He wouldn’t wear his heart on his sleeve. But to be the person to whom he said ‘rather divine things’ must be to feel oneself unimaginably exquisite.

There was that night they all went out into the garden when the all clear sounded. The scent of the tobacco plants was so sweet it was like a presence, like a naked nymph following one about, and the moon was so bright that the red roses kept their colour, and the white were luminous like the moths. Standing apart, Lisby was fascinated by his shadow lying clear-­cut on the lawn. She stared at it, and then, looking up, saw it printed, gigantic, across the sky. It gave her a queer cold feeling, seeming to confirm an idea she had had of him lately: that everything he was concerned in here and now was the beginning of something that would go on happening outside this sphere. It would always be there, behind her eyelids.

After that, she couldn’t go on trying to make up to him for the times that Brenda was too much occupied with someone else to bother about him. It would be a kind of mockery. The only thing was to keep out of his way.

But the last evening of his embarkation leave, when he came to say good-­bye, it was she who had to see him to the front door. Brenda was fey that night, with a kind of febrile gaiety, because the favoured lover of the moment was home on forty-­eight hours’ leave, and she had no eyes for anyone but him; and Charlotte was deeply involved with Richard Harkness. When they said good-­bye, they would doubtless be driven into each other’s arms. One could see it in their eyes when they looked at each other.

Lisby’s eyes fell on the little willow. She seized it and put it into his outstretched hand. ‘Please take it—for luck,’ she said.

‘But you can’t give this away, Miss Avery. It’s—it’s . . . much too lovely,’ he stammered.

‘Please, please—it’s more yours than mine.’

‘It’s terribly kind of you. Your sisters—you’ve been so kind letting me come. I shall dream of this house.’

‘But you’ll come again,’ said Lisby, speaking as lightly as she could.

‘I’d try to . . . in the spirit, if not in the flesh,’ he said, with his crooked smile. Why must he say a thing so devastating?

‘Look at Orion—like some secret heavenly diagram,’ said Lisby at the open door, because she had no word of comfort for him. (Oh, dear! He’ll think I’m trying to be appealing, trying to be a poetical little puss, trying to get at him, she thought despairingly.) If only Brenda would come out for a moment and be very sweet in that way she had of being responsive to another’s mood! She could have given him something to take away with him, some cryptic remark, that he could dwell upon and cherish, as if it were a tiny key she had put into his hand to unlock a door in the future. But she was caught away into a private heaven, and so he had to go without any hope.

He looked up at the heartbreaking glitter of Orion, so serene, so triumphant above the tortured world. ‘A lover might use it as a code,’ he said, almost under his breath. ‘Abelard signing his letters to Heloise.’

He looked down at her, hesitating a moment, as if there were something he wanted to say. And then, with a sigh, he turned away. As he looked back at the gate to salute her, the little tree in his hand caught the starlight and shone with a faint blue fire.

He never wrote. Lisby, sorting out the post, sometimes looked wonderingly at a letter addressed to Brenda in a hand-­writing she didn’t know, but the name on the flap of the envelope was never his.

When the war was over at last, Richard Harkness, liberated from a prison camp in Germany, came back to claim Charlotte. Their wedding was fixed for the autumn.

‘By the way, Brenda,’ Charlotte said casually one day, looking up from a letter she was writing, ‘I forgot to tell you. Richard says that Simon Byrne was a prisoner in the same Offlag. He died last year.’

‘Oh, poor darling!’ said Brenda, in the sweet, hollow voice she used when the conventions demanded an assumption of sorrow. One’s heart had been wrung so often that there had come a time when it recorded merely a mechanical spasm. She went on arranging the flowers with a set expression.

Lisby said nothing. She sat very still in the recesses of the armchair and clasped her knees to still their trembling. ‘So much death, one cannot bear it,’ she said at last, and got herself out of the room somehow. She always took things to heart—as if she suffered in her own body the agony of unknown millions.

‘It’s all very well for Lisby,’ said Brenda with a shrug. ‘But, after all, she hasn’t had any personal loss in this war. Not like you and me. I mean, when someone’s killed who’s been in love with one, it makes it all so terribly poignant. I sometimes think I’ve felt so much, I can’t feel any more. Those poor lambs!’ She sighed and dipped her face into the roses, as if she would leave with them the expression of grief she could now decently abandon. It was almost as though she were leaving them on his grave to symbolise her thoughts of him, that would fade more quickly than they. ‘He was sweet, but rather dumb,’ she said.

‘Did he ever——’ asked Charlotte, looking over her tortoise-­shell glasses.

‘Not in so many words. You all took it for granted it was me. But perhaps, after all, you were the attraction, Charlotte.’ But the hint of doubt found no expression in the tones of her voice.

‘Or Lisby. It really is rather awful the way we leave her out of account.’

Charlotte sealed her letter and took off her glasses. She had a face like La Belle Ferronière, on which the glasses had the air of an amusing affectation. But Brenda had the flowerlike delicacy of a Piero della Francesca. Lisby had seen the resemblances and had made her sisters a present of them. But no one had noticed that she herself was like the watching girl who holds a basket on her head in the background of El Greco’s Christ in the Temple.

‘Of course,’ said Charlotte, affixing a stamp, ‘it wasn’t I. That’s a thing I never make a mistake about. A woman always knows.’

‘Well, I am not so cocksure about love as you seem to be. I mean, I’m inclined to say to myself, ‘If he does so and so, if he remembers what hat I wore the day before yesterday, if he bothers to look up the address I’m staying at in the telephone book, then I shall know for certain. But I don’t remember applying any such tests to Simon. Somehow we never got that far. Though I had my suspicions, of course.’

Brenda carried the roses across the room and put them on the piano, in the midst of the numerous photographs, of young men in uniform. Surreptitiously she changed the place of one. He had been shot down over Hamburg, and his place was among the dead. Perhaps no one but herself, who was responsible for it, was aware of this arrangement of the photographs. She had a feeling about the matter of which she would not have spoken for the world. It did not exactly amount to a superstition. Perhaps it meant no more than did the meticulous dividing up of her books into their respective categories. It irritated her to find a novel thrust in between two volumes of poetry. Death, perhaps, was poetry, and life, prose. Or was it the other way round?

In the midst of preparations for the wedding, no one, it seemed, gave another thought to Simon Byrne.

‘Lisby seems rather odd these days—sort of strung-­up,’ said Charlotte one day. ‘Do you think, Brenda, that subconsciously she minds my getting married and your being engaged? I mean, it can’t be much fun, poor child, seeing happiness through other people’s eyes, as Shakespeare has already remarked.’ She snapped off a thread and took the pins out of a seam.

Brenda looked down with a preoccupied expression at the ring on her long pale hand, where it lay on a fold of crêpe de Chine she had been sewing. ‘How incredibly lucky we are that our two have come through alive!’ she said. ‘Gerald doesn’t know how lucky he is; because it might have been John. I don’t know, but I think it might have been. I was devastated when he was killed. I dare say you are right about Lisby. But what can we do . . . ?’

‘That cyclamen colour you’ve chosen for the bridesmaids—of course, you’ll look divine in it, but it’s trying for Lisby. Heaven knows, she’s sallow enough.’

‘But, my dear, what was I to do? We had the stuff and we’ve got no coupons. If only Gerald were back, we could have had a double wedding and both got out of Lisby’s way. I feel we rather swamp her, you know—like two arc lamps putting out the moonlight. Now, isn’t that a tribute to our Lis?’

Charlotte was married on a golden day. While they waited for her in the porch, Lisby thought that Brenda looked more like an Italian primitive than ever, pale and bright as an angel. (But we are all wrong for the blue horizon and the golden leaves—too shrill, too springlike, she thought.) Their reflections stained with pink the dew-­drops in a spider’s web slung between two tombstones.

A cab drove up to the lich gate, and Charlotte came down the path on the arm of an uncle, her dark eyes shining through her veil. She was so majestic, so withdrawn that they did not venture to speak to her, but spread out her train, whispering nervously together.

Richard Harkness stood at the altar steps. To Lisby he had rather a vulpine look. It argued a certain spirituality in Charlotte, not to be deceived by outward appearances, but to swoop unerringly on the qualities she wanted. But he hadn’t been Simon’s sort. He had never mentioned Simon’s name in Lisby’s presence. She was grateful to him for that, but she couldn’t forgive him.

She stole a glance apprehensively at the best man. He had been in the camp too—a doctor, they said. He had a dark, ascetic face, sensitive and melancholy. One must keep out of his way.

The wedding reception was like any other: the strained hilarity, the desperate frivolity, lit with a perilous brightness as of unshed tears. Corks popped, the cake was cut, the toasts proposed. Charlotte came out of her trance, and Richard made a speech so charming that all her friends began to think they knew, after all, what she saw in him.

There was Brenda by the window, trying desperately to make conversation with Captain Oliver. When her voice was high and strained like that, one knew she was wilting, and there were those faint mauve shadows under her eyes. The man was difficult. He appeared to have no capacity for small talk.

‘By the way, did you come across someone who was a friend of mine—Simon Byrne? He was in the tanks,’ she said.

Brenda . . . don’t . . . Don’t! Lisby cried out soundlessly, with a pain like cramp about her heart. His name seemed to sound through the room like a clash of cymbals. She felt that it must pierce every breastbone. It made a stranger of Brenda. It was incomprehensible that she could use it to make conversation, that to her it could be a name like any other.

Lisby saw the start that Captain Oliver gave. He turned quickly and looked at Brenda—a long, searching look.

‘Yes, I knew Byrne,’ he said.

‘He was such a dear. We liked him so much. Look, Charlotte has gone up to change. I must fly after her.’

They were gone at last. Charlotte leaned out and waved. Someone threw a slipper after the taxicab.

In the throng at the gate, Lisby was aware of Captain Oliver edging his way toward her.

‘Miss Avery,’ he said in her ear, ‘may I speak to you a moment alone?’

‘In the morning room,’ said Lisby, very pale. For some unfathomable reason she picked up her bouquet from the hall table before preceding him into the little yellow room.

A picture glowing with evening appeared in the frame of the window. In the foreground, the black trunk of the mulberry tree, about which still dangled a few heart-­shaped leaves of sour green, and to the right the long silver plumes of the pampas grass, had a strange significance, as if the words ‘black, gold, silver’ were being reiterated in a poem. The blue October mist lay beyond, veiling the lawn, and a little sumac tree burned like a torch at the edge of the mist. A bird that had abandoned music for the winter made a grasshopper sound.

The pampas grass. Charlotte had tried to dig it up—a vulgar interloper, she had said. Lisby clung desperately to her thoughts. She did not want to hear what this man had to say. She sank down on the sofa and began mechanically to take her bouquet to pieces. The colour was drained out of her face, and she looked ghastly in the cyclamen shade that was so becoming to Brenda.

‘So you knew Simon Byrne,’ said Captain Oliver, looking down at her. ‘I wonder . . . perhaps you could help me, Miss Avery? I was with him when he died.’

‘Have you, perhaps, a message . . . for my sister?’ asked Lisby faintly, arranging little sprigs of heather on her knee.

‘That’s what I don’t know,’ he said with a sigh. ‘There is something I’d like to tell someone—but not the wrong person. You see, Simon meant a great deal to me. Could you tell me, did she ever give him a little tree, a willow? I suppose it was one of those Chinese things.’

‘No,’ said Lisby, very low, ‘she never gave him anything.’

‘I am going to tell you,’ said Captain Oliver, as if making a sudden decision. ‘A secret would be safe with you, wouldn’t it? He was badly hurt, you know. His wound never healed. He was terribly ill all the time; but the odd thing was that through it all, he was never less than himself. They couldn’t do anything to Simon. They couldn’t strip him of a single one of his qualities. It was as if he had some inward source of happiness, a core of peace in his heart. The camp was short of doctors and they were only too pleased to make use of me, so I was able to make things a little easier for him.’

‘I am glad,’ she said, bent over her flowers, ‘that he had you to look after him.’

‘The night before he died,’ went on Captain Oliver, in a low deliberate voice, ‘he dictated a letter to his mother in South Africa. He was a bit of a poet, you know. It was a very touching letter. I suppose she has it now, poor soul. I said, “Is there no one else, Simon?” He shook his head. “There was a girl,” he said, “but she never knew she was my girl.” I asked him to tell me about her, thinking it might comfort him. He said, “She is a little, quiet creature—like mignonette—and her eyes go light and dark with her thoughts. I knew in my bones she was meant for me. Once, when the pain was very bad, I thought she came and kissed me. I felt her cheek against mine. It was soft and cool—like young buds, as I always imagined it would be. And the pain went away and I went to sleep. You know, Robert, she wouldn’t mind my dreaming that. She has such exquisite compassion. When I said good-­bye, she gave me the loveliest thing she had—a little willow tree. It was smashed to bits in my kit when the shell got us.” I thought to myself, “Perhaps she did care, that girl.” He died toward morning, very peacefully, without speaking again.’

Lisby sat very still. ‘So cold . . . so cold,’ she said, chafing her hands as if the hands of the dying lay between them.

‘So you were his girl,’ said Robert Oliver.

‘He was my dear, dear love,’ whispered Lisby. She bowed her head on her knees and wept soundlessly.

He thought, ‘It is sad for a girl when her first avowal of love has to be made to a third person’. And, going softly to the door, he turned the key in the lock and let himself out by the window.

‘Lisby cried her eyes out after you left,’ wrote Brenda to Charlotte. ‘But at night she looked so radiant, one might have thought it was her wedding day. There were dozens of letters for you by the evening post (I’ve sent them on) and some for me. I sorted them out, and said, as one usually does, “None for you, I’m afraid, Lisby darling.” She looked at me so strangely, and said; “I have had mine—one that was never written.” What could she have meant? I said, “What on earth do you mean?” But I knew from the look on her face that it is one of those things she will never tell.’