Latchkey Ladies — using the term in Anne’s, not in any Leicester Squarish sense — move about a great deal. Not to Biarritz, or Nice, or Paris, or Rome; not even to Bath, or Cowes, or the North. Ascot and the moors have no meaning for them. But they seek the variety of Pimlico and Chelsea and Bloomsbury; the finer air of Bayswater and Hampstead. They occupy tiny flats in Chancery Lane and the Inns of Court. The cheaper parts of the Embankment and the purlieus of Belgravia and Mayfair know them too. There is not a street leading from the Strand to the River where, above offices and warehouses and committee rooms that deal alternately with swine fever and children’s country holidays you may not flush a brace or more of these same latchkey ladies nesting together near the housetops. Their knowledge of landladies, of lodging-housekeepers, of ‘manageresses’ of all grades is profound. Their latchkey is the symbol that admits them to a dreary intimacy with the habits and ways of these people who, for a fee, hand over the metal seal of liberty to eat and live and die unregarded. Unregarded that is to say only in the sense of awakening no warm pity or interest. Curiosity, comment and intrusion of the baser sort are common, and are a frequent cause of the ladies taking wing to other parts. Hope will spring eternal, variety is never impossible in London. You can change your ill. Latchkey ladies do so remarkably often. Theirs is not the monotony known to the married of always fitting the same key into the same lock.
About the time that Anne betook herself up to Campden Hill to teach the First Form under the extremely superior development of latchkey lady personified by Paul and Veritas, a wave of change broke over the Mimosa Club. The Hon Mrs Bridson went with her friend Miss Spicer to Southsea, leaving her address — on a visiting card — with the astonished Anne, and a pompous but kindly meant invitation to let her know from time to time how she got on. Maquita, overhearing this weighty speech, instantly volunteered in the most gushing terms to write to Miss Spicer every few weeks in order to sketch her future career in the Pensions Office, and also Petunia’s theatre conquests. Miss Spicer, admiring her wicked ease of manner, tried to subdue Maquita’s pealing laugh in vain, but Mrs Bridson merely turned a dull and chilly eye upon her. It had never quelled Maquita’s irrepressible cheerfulness and did not do so now.
‘To leave that young woman is no matter of pain to me,’ Mrs Bridson observed to Miss Spicer, but Honoria sighed a little. Southsea might be warmer than London, and a pleasant change in the spring, but she doubted if in the select pension to which they were committed she would find anything as fresh, as vital and as satisfying to some need in herself as Maquita, Anne and even Petunia Garry, half guttersnipe, half mystery.
Maquita, who welcomed any excuse for a flitting, gave Mrs Hickey notice the same day as Anne did, and not all the tears and revilings of that irate tyrant could shake her glad determination to go. The cast-down wretchedness of Alice, the poor deaf drudge, at their departure hurt them more than all Mrs Hickey’s mixed railing and regret, and Anne could hardly bear it when the downtrodden creature, coming in with the hot water at night, stood with tears dropping down her cheeks to say in her toneless low voice, ‘Oh, Miss, don’t go! We’ve never kept a lodger so long. Give Mrs Hickey another chance — she’s a quick-tempered woman, but she’s not bad.’ The girls ransacked their limited wardrobes to find something that would be useful to Alice. She was grateful, but she wept openly under the red and baleful nose of Mrs Hickey when they went. Petunia joined Maquita in a boarding-house in Holland Park Road; Lynette Mason went to Penge to her brother’s house for the summer, suddenly developing an affection for the howling baby, who, it seemed, was very fond of her and would go to her in preference to its own parents. Mrs Benny Arnold’s anxieties about her husband ended in the news of his death. A sister came and took her away to the country, numb and broken but strangely calm now that the worst had happened.
So the little group of the winter broke up, and new people flowed into the Mimosa Club. Petunia as spring advanced shirked her office more and more, sometimes for an hour, sometimes for a half-day, sometimes for a day. Simon was out of England, and the two pounds a week that paid her lodging and laundry were unsupplemented. Her income from the war-work she did not do diminished till she could not even buy a new ‘cammy’ with it. Maquita grew anxious and remonstrated, but Petunia was unperturbed.
‘I don’t like the old office, Maquita dear,’ she said amiably. ‘I’ll get Simon to sell some of my mother’s jewels when he comes back and pay back what I borrow from you. Oh, I do love the hot sun, and the shop-windows.’
She walked about London in one of her dream-moods, forgetting that she was shabby, and surveying the shops uncovetously. She even forgot to look at men. The mysterious side of her queer nature was in possession of her for the time, and there was something childish and sweet in her expression. She walked with her little chorus-girl swing from the hips, her hands in her shabby old ulster pockets, for once blankly unconscious of the effect she was creating. Fancies flitted across her mind. She imagined the winged boy of the Piccadilly fountain impatient under the desecrating hands of the workmen, who thus late in the war were caging him in wood. Perhaps he slipped down at night into the basin itself and played with the floating petals left by the flower-sellers. Funny little fantastic boy, in the dim street lights. Perhaps he flew like a moth to the Park … Possibly the parks indeed were alive with the released spirits of London at night-time.
Petunia surveyed St Paul’s and the Temple, and shared her scrappy meals with the pigeons. But at dusk she flitted like a moth to the shop-windows.
She was lost in dreamy admiration of some sketchy draperies of silk and ribbon, tantalisingly shown beneath the heavily shaded lights that war precautions demanded, in a Leicester Square window one evening when a man stopped beside her, stared intently at her profile, then into the window, and finally went on. In a moment he turned back, and stood beside her, gazing into the shop-window. Petunia had not noticed him before, but she became aware of him now, and something that had slept in her awoke. She cast him a small, sidelong glance, and saw beneath a Staff cap a square-set face staring hard at the frivolous garments of the window. Actually her profile reflected in the glass was absorbing his attention. Petunia stood still.
There is plenty of meretricious romance in Leicester Square or thereabouts — every hour of every day and night, London being what it is, and Leicester Square being where it is — one almost said where she is! But occasionally a pure spring of real romance may jet up without warning from a trodden and unlikely bit of earth. Robert Wentworth, wondering impatiently what in heaven and earth the girl could see in those tawdry rags in the window labelled ‘Undies for Air Raids’, to keep her standing so long, was a romantic survival, and Petunia was to learn to the full what pure romance could do for her.
Of this both he and she were naturally unconscious. Robert was not the type of man who studies feminine shop-windows with any pleasure, and when Petunia moved off — with her little chorus-girl swing and a jaunty look from under her three-cornered black hat — he stepped beside her and spoke to her. Her response, which was ready and theatrical, her tripping walk, her play with her beautiful eyes, her voice — not Cockney or common, but odd — dismayed him, but only superficially. For in the window-glass Robert was sure he had seen midmost June, the end of the war, the clearance of the tangled and dreadful dreams that had had him at their mercy for months and months, the beginning of all knowledge, and in short, love.
He had always known that love would come to him like that. Like a thunderclap he meant. Later on he was vague about the place of his meeting with Petunia and much ashamed of the underclothes. Petunia, with her malicious sense of humour, told some of his friends.
He saluted her stiffy. ‘May I walk a little way with you?’ he asked, and added very formally, ‘I want to explain to you — ah — that I don’t usually speak to people without an introduction. I hope you will not misunderstand me?’
‘Oh, don’t you?’ Petunia said innocently. ‘I always do. I think it’s the best way. There are so many people you can never be introduced to, aren’t there?’
‘I must talk to you. You are not like anyone I’ve ever seen. Will you come and dine with me? I’m not an adventurer — I mean nothing that isn’t absolutely all right,’ Robert declared.
‘I ought to ask my mother first — and, anyway, I ought to change,’ Petunia said, hesitating.
Robert eagerly overruled both these objections; girls did as they pleased in the war; he was sure they knew some of the same people, anyhow, and he’d drag someone up to present him properly. Petunia consented to dine at the Piccadilly Grill.
Robert liked the way she walked in and took her place without the slightest awkwardness of either too much or too little knowledge. His own sisters, who were brought up in the country, always entered a restaurant as if they were children being taken out for a treat, looking round with timid smiles for the direction of the man of the party. Petunia was perfectly simple, and her little delicate airs at table pleased him too. They talked. Robert told her his name, his age, which was thirty-one, of his poems and the music he composed, his sisters’ names, and what a stodgy crowd his relations were — Pallisers and Wentworths and Ames-Ferrers, all bishops and squires and Cabinet Ministers, all Conservative, all High Church, all been-on-the-land-before-the-Conquest people, you know. Robert, the head of a large family of sisters and aunts, owned a house in town, a place and some villages in Slowshire, and meant to live on the land and be a model country squire — keenly interested in modern music and literature — after the war. He wanted to marry, of course, soon.
He did not tell her much about the wound and shellshock that had only lately released him from hospital, or of the very little work he was fit to do in Whitehall which had lately promoted him to staff-major and pinned the DSO on his tunic. He kept from her as yet the haunting misery of his dreams, but as he looked at her charming, changing face, over which expression rippled like wind-blown sunlight over a cornfield, a growing jubilation shouted in his heart that he had found safety and sanity and the rapture that he had longed to feel in this self-possessed little chorus person picked up at dusk in Leicester Square. Robert didn’t say that. He said — to himself — ‘This glorious girl — this darling — this delicate wonder. But I won’t allow her to curl her hair like that! What teeth, what a lovely line her chin makes,’ and much more, silently, and to outward appearance sitting a rather grave and stolid young man in a blaring, glittering restaurant that does not usually conduce to self-restraint.
Petunia Garry told him that Petunia Garry wasn’t her real name, but refused to disclose it, and spoke of her father, the VC brigadier-general. She told him many details of her childhood that alternately saddened and delighted him. And she added hesitatingly, ‘I said something about my “mother” to you just now, but I am staying with an old friend of my real mother’s, that’s all. I am so lonely that sometimes I call her mother.’
Petunia’s eyes filled with tears, and Robert, terribly moved, could hardly resist pressing her hand.
They talked till the restaurant closed, and then Robert drove her round the parks in a taxi, talking still, and asking her endless questions, fascinated. He was an idealist, and he would not so much as touch her hand.
She told him she lived in Clifford Street, and showed him Simon Meebes’ house. The taxi stopped at the door, and Robert stared at her, thunderstruck.
‘But I know the fellow who lives here — I hope to goodness you don’t. What do you mean, Petunia? What is the right address?’
Petunia gave him a long, frightened look. ‘No, it’s not where I live, of course,’ she said in a low voice, ‘but I do know Mr Meebes. He’s in Italy now. I only said his house because it was the first address that came into my head. I meant to get out and run home when you had gone. Oh, I have learnt to be afraid of men,’ she added in a whisper, hiding her eyes.
Robert could not speak for a moment. Then he said desperately, ‘Oh, haven’t I shown you that you can trust me, you poor little hunted child! I will try again to show you that you can trust me. You will let me see you again? You will be quite frank and honest with me, won’t you?’
She let him drive her to the boarding-house in Holland Park Road, and next evening when he called to take her out to dinner he met Maquita. She did not strike him as old enough to be addressed as mother by Petunia, but Miss Garry had forgotten having invented that little fiction by this time, so she was unembarrassed.
All that Major Wentworth had told Petunia about himself was perfectly true; many other things she divined for herself with that sure instinct that had disclosed the facts and characters of the Mimosa Club to her. Robert was plodding and stodgy like his relatives, with a touch of imagination to leaven the lump — but a touch only. He was snobbish to the inmost fibre of his stolid being: the Wentworths, the Pallisers, the Ames- Ferrers, and the like, were not only the salt and bulwark of England, they were England. But a streak of fantastic idealism lightened that lump also. A Wentworth couldn’t marry beneath him, but he might, conceivably, raise someone not in any of the proper books to a condition so like the product of the blue and red books that she would be received without question as ‘one of ourselves’. The thought absorbed him. He meant to marry Petunia. He was not stupid, and he was soon convinced that Petunia was not in any of the books, after she had laid claim to relationship with several well-known names, and had been easily tripped up. He knew her pretty well — in one way — when she imparted to him that her name was really Phyllis Mary Eliot, and that Sir Algernon Eliot, VC, was her father. His laughter was incomprehensible to her, and she sat looking very much offended, till he said, ‘My dear child, think of something much better than that! Poor old Algy may be a brigadier-general, but it’s the fun of this bally old war that he’s only thirty-seven, and I’ve known him all my life, and he’s certainly not your father!’
After that she obstinately maintained that Petunia Garry was her real name, and that her parents had both died since she had run away from home. Robert couldn’t make head or tail of it. He was persuaded that she was hiding her real self and her real history under the compulsion of some overpowering fear.
He was determined to marry her, but to discover and marry the real Petunia. He undertook this task in a manner so methodical and yet so discreet that Petunia was simply bewildered by it. He studied her from morning to night in every phase. He introduced his friends to her and made up parties for the opera and plays, and questioned them as to the impression Petunia made on them. In no case was it ordinary. He examined Petunia as to her opinion of his friends, and was delighted by her clear, definite little grasp of them, the warped and egotistic Bohemians that he knew, as well as the men who were simply friends of his own class. He watched the effect of music, of dancing, of colour on her, and rejoiced that she was sensitive to all forms of beauty, with a natural discernment. He made her talk to him by the hour, and he tried to seek out all the people that she had known at the Mimosa Club, to wrest their most fleeting impressions and knowledge of her from them. He harried Maquita, questioning and cross-questioning her. He had calmly called her by her Christian name from the first, and she reciprocated.
‘Really, Robert,’ she said to him one evening, when hours of his psychoanalysis had driven her nearly insane, ‘I’m accustomed to be taken out to dinner by men who take some interest in me, but you simply drag me over and over the old ground of what I do think of Petunia Garry. I think she’s a vampire, if you must know it. She exhausts me.’
Robert made Petunia introduce him to Anne, and he found the Lodge School, and after writing notes to Anne three times a day, took her out to dinner finally. Warned by Maquita’s outburst, he did not at once mention the only subject the world held for him. He plunged into it suddenly.
‘You know, of course, that Petunia is a liar?’
‘I shouldn’t say so,’ Anne said, startled.
‘She is, poor little darling, almost congenital. She does not even remember what she says from one day to another. She isn’t logical. She has a streak of genius in it all, none the less, feeling, power, imagination. She will be great, creatively, some day. But what makes her lie? What — what?’ Robert asked. ‘Some fearful motive that has almost killed her soul — but not quite.’ Robert helped himself to more wine, and he already had quite enough.
He poured out his hopes of finding the real Petunia hidden under all the falsity; he enlarged on his conception of the gem-like purity of her soul and mind.
The voice of many bishops in the family spoke in his voice when he said reverently, ‘Whatever is true or false in her stories, she is only nineteen now, and she has seen a very hard side of life. God has been very near Petunia to keep her safe.’
He spoke in sincerity, and if he hadn’t been drinking a little too much Anne would have been sympathetic. As it was, she said after a pause, ‘Petunia — have you ever thought of it? — is like a salamander. She lives in the fire because it’s her own element.’
When he thought it over Robert decided never to forgive Anne for this remark, but at the moment he let it pass, because she made a suggestion immediately afterwards that took his attention.
‘Mr Simon Meebes knows Petunia better than we do, perhaps. Why don’t you ask him about her history? He’s in Italy, I believe, but he’ll be back if it gets at all dangerous there.’
Anne liked Robert’s honesty and his tremendously high ideals, but his persistence bored her, and his snobbery, his determination to prove that Petunia had recognisable blood in her made her angry.
Meantime Petunia herself was half pleased and half bored.
‘Robert treats me so respectfully,’ she complained to Maquita. From the day she met him she had left the office definitely. That had been the subject of a tirade to Anne and Maquita once when he had asked himself to tea with them.
‘You two put Petunia in an office — a Government office! Petunia, a delicate child, half gossamer, half poet!’ Robert stormed.
‘She needed the money,’ Anne said sensibly.
‘I am in an office,’ Maquita said.
‘So was I,’ said Anne.
‘You and Anne, yes! You don’t mind it, it doesn’t hurt you!’ the infatuated Robert cried. ‘But Petunia, all nerves, all sensitiveness to what is ugly and sordid! The idea of thinking Petunia should make money! How you could do it, Maquita!’
‘Simon Meebes advised it, and Petunia would do anything he said,’ Anne said maliciously. ‘And she stood it very well, and flirted with the clerks.’
Anne went away disgusted. Maquita took Robert with good-tempered laughter.
To go out with Robert and meet his friends Petunia had to have clothes, and Major Wentworth, who couldn’t buy them and give them to her — according to his code, not hers — solved the difficulty characteristically. He presented Petunia with a bank-book, and introduced her to the mysteries of its use. He settled a considerable sum of money on her.
‘Whatever happens, dear, whether you love me and marry me or not, I want to have done that for you,’ Robert said.
Petunia was not really mercenary, and she was touched.
He helped her to choose her clothes, and they were so various and so pleasing that it would not have been human if Anne and Maquita had not envied her a little.
Robert was in love more deeply every day, No vulgarity, no cheapness, no failure diverted him from his quest for the ideal he was sure existed. And he required Petunia to love him before he married her. The very facility of her response, her eagerness to meet emotion with emotion, put him on his guard. She gave him imaginative sympathy, but her heart seemed as elusive as a drop of quicksilver.
He searched for it until he puzzled and wearied her. He made love to her, and she met him half-way, but couldn’t understand him.
‘What is it you want?’ she asked him one day frankly, like a child. ‘I don’t want to marry you. You have given me enough, and you are so good. I will live with you now, if that is what you want.’
Robert told this to Maquita, touched to tears by what he thought the highest imaginable point of Petunia’s confidence in him. Then he laid his head on his arms on the table and groaned.
‘She didn’t know what she said!’ he cried.
Maquita did not contradict. She began to admire Petunia. She was neither greedy nor ambitious.
Petunia, half enjoying herself, half tired of Robert’s incessant attention — Whitehall saw him less than ever — made her escape from him one afternoon by one of her otter-like mental wriggles that furnished him with perpetual psychological interest however much they annoyed him, and went up to the garden at Campden Hill to see Anne. She had a letter from Thomas Watson in her brocade and tortoiseshell bag which she wished to read to her, but as Anne declined to hear it she put it away and began to talk of Robert.
‘He’s a great dear,’ she said in her usual phrase, and with her unfailing perception, ‘but he’s a little dull. I don’t love him, Anne. I see how good he is, but he never makes me all excited inside. Once I was in love — oh fearfully — so I know. Did I tell you about Dennis, Anne, and how I tried to poison myself in the Grand Casino Hotel because he went away? That was terrible, but do you know I want to feel it again, and Robert can’t make me. Even the Boy could a little, and Simon — if he wanted to. But Robert tries too hard.’
The story she had told of Reggie da Costa and herself now reversed itself, and Anne could not doubt that this time Petunia was telling the truth. She made the sordid little drama live again, and her eyes burnt with memory.
Anne spoke with all her force.
‘Petunia, put all that out of your mind, it’s over. And how can you always be talking of Simon Meebes as if you wanted him to make love to you? You can’t — an old, horrible, vicious beast. Use your common sense. You couldn’t love a man like that; you couldn’t think of it.’
‘I’d know how to keep him all to myself. I wouldn’t give him all that he wanted, like that red-haired Lorraine,’ Petunia said sullenly, craft and desire making her exquisite face immemorially old.
Anne felt sick. She spoke coldly and lightly. ‘If you really don’t want to marry anyone so attractive and decent as Major Wentworth, and you don’t care for the family places and the family pearls, and the family dinners with the Pallisers trailing their early-Saxon roots behind them, then you ought to say so, Petunia, and let him go.’
‘Let him go! I can’t make him go,’ wailed Petunia, exasperated. ‘I’ve offered to live with him. That might make him go — after — and he cried about it. I’d like to live with him — he’s a great dear, and then I needn’t meet his mother. She looks so stiff, and Robert says she’s the stodgiest of them all. But he won’t. I believe he’s in love with me.’
‘He’s remarkable,’ Anne said. ‘You’ll have to love him, Petunia.’
‘He’ll make me, I suppose,’ Petunia said, preparing to leave. ‘I do like him. But he’s too respectful to me, Anne. Would you like it — a man to be just as respectful when he’s alone with you as when there are people in the room?
The wooing of the respectful Robert went forward all the same.