The drawing-room was rich with a bloomy dusk and Laura turned on one or two lights. All the night whispers and smells drifted in through the windows on the wings of vagrant moths. Unconsciously the women dropped their voices to a lower key, tuning themselves to the twilight as they fluttered about the dim room, powdering their noses and discussing Hugo. Their soft, murmuring laughter was like the cooing of doves.
“I’ve always been so fond of him …”
“Such a pity …”
“A creole, isn’t she?”
“But darling, aren’t creoles black?”
“Do you know I’ve never seen her.”
“Aggie! It’s not true. You couldn’t have helped …”
“Really too well dressed, in that spit-and-polish American way. I expect she always wears afternoon dresses in the afternoon.”
“… and invariably in the weekly papers …”
“Somebody ought to disentangle him. He’s much too nice …”
“And the money he must be making …”
“Aggie! We think it’s your mission.”
“Don’t you think that Aggie ought …”
Nobody asked what the girls thought, for Hugo, though not much their senior, was no affair of theirs. So they handed the cigarettes in silence and slipped off as soon as they could, through the long windows on to the terrace behind the house.
The moon was rising and there was only a little fleck of pale sky left in the west, to show where the sun had been. The girls ran down the garden paths, between the clipped box bushes, and paused by the fountain pool. In the wan light there was no difference between Marianne’s pink chiffon and the yellow she had lent to Solange. They were two flitting wraiths and their low-pitched voices hardly broke the quiet of the summer night. Only one thing in the garden looked whiter than they did, and that was the long bed of lilies by the south wall.
“Do you like lilies?” asked Solange, pausing to sniff.
“No,” snapped Marianne.
“I thought you didn’t. Why?”
“They’re like Aggie—too good to be true. You think: how wonderful! And then the smell makes you sick. And you see there’s a brown dead leaf hanging down somewhere on their stalks.”
Solange laughed. She had fewer reasons for disliking Aggie.
They went down the path, past the lilies to a place where peach trees sprawled against the brick and a great, untidy bed of night stocks sent out an aromatic blast. The struggling, insignificant flowers stood out like a faded Milky Way of small stars. Even at night, in their hour of glory, they were nothing to look at. But their scent was more than a scent. It was a world. It filled the soul with a transport of hope and melancholy. Solange and Marianne stood in silence, sniffing vigorously.
“If lilies are like Aggie,” said Solange, “then night stocks are like you.”
“Euphemei.”
“What?”
“It’s Greek.”
“I didn’t know you knew Greek.”
“I don’t really. Miss Fosdyke used to teach me some, but we never got further than things like: ‘Oh that I might be buzzed about by bees’ and ‘the hoplites escaped their own notice rushing about in the market place.’ But I learnt Euphemei from my Uncle Julian. It’s a polite way of saying ‘Shut up’.”
“How can anyone escape their own notice?”
“The Greeks could apparently.”
Solange meditated for a moment and then said:
“It would be a lovely thing to do. I suppose you’d say that animals did. But you mustn’t be cross if I say that night stocks are like you. They are. Horrid people don’t know about them, and they’re just as good if you stand near them or go half a mile off. Whereas a lily, especially a Madonna lily …”
“I’d rather be a dead nettle than a Madonna lily.”
“Oh? Do you think dead nettles are bad flowers?”
“Harmless. But uninteresting. Listen! There’s a nightingale. No, it can’t be! It’s too late.”
Far away, in some elm trees across the hay fields, they could hear four long, clear whistles. But the music was so faint that a burst of laughter from the house soon smothered it. Aggie’s voice, raised in glee, came through the drawing-room window.
“He bit her? Not Sally?”
“No, no! Not Sally. Netta.”
“Poor Sally! How she would have enjoyed …”
“It’s not true!”
“But Philomena! Where?”
“Oh, only on the shoulder. And his aide-de-camp …”
The voices dropped and Marianne said:
“They’re having fun now we’ve gone.”
Solange said:
“Funny to think of Aggie disentangling anyone!”
Marianne would have thought it funny if she had not still been so unhappy. She was listening for the sound of the men’s voices coming into the drawing-room, and a few minutes later, in a sudden significant lull of the women’s laughter, she heard Adrian saying something about ‘Charles’ Wain over the new chimney.’ Breaking suddenly away from her friend she flew lightly up the path and on to the terrace outside the drawing-room window. Inside she could see Hugo, talking to her grandmother. He was still there. And she darted away again, her pale skirts brushing the glass as if she had been a bird blown past the window.
“What was it? What did you run away for?” demanded Solange, as she returned.
“To see if Aggie has begun.”
“Has she?”
“Not yet.”
“I wonder …” began Solange.
“What?”
“You’ll be offended.”
“I expect so. But that doesn’t generally stop you.”
“I wonder you don’t disentangle him yourself.”
“How …?”
“Oh, anybody could do it. He’s as vain as a peacock. Just let him see that you haven’t fallen at his feet.”
“I meant what for? Why should I?”
Voices echoed under the arch of night. They were all coming out on to the terrace and the garden was full of pale, fluttering skirts. The two girls sought safety in the pleached alley, where they were hidden.
“We’re safe here,” said Marianne. “They’ll all go and look at the lilies. They’re Aggie’s favourite flower. She’ll tell him to come and smell them with her.”
“Hope he gets his nose all yellow,” muttered Solange viciously.
“He’ll remember not to, I expect. He never escapes his own notice.”
“Oh Marianne, you can’t! You really can’t …” she could not get her tongue round the indecent word. “You can’t …”
“I do.”
“Then for heaven’s sake why don’t you lift a finger to get him?”
“What good would that do?”
“You’d be better than Aggie. At least you can disentangle him from that.”
Now Lady Geraldine was calling to them. She wanted a note taken over to the rectory inviting the parson and his wife to dinner on Sunday. Voices echoed the summons from under the apple boughs, and between the box bushes.
“Ssh! Don’t answer,” whispered Marianne. “Don’t you see, it isn’t Aggie, or that Creole person, or anybody like that that he needs to be disentangled from. It’s much worse …”
“Mary … Anne! Solange! Mary … Anne!”
“It’s himself. You see? Himself. At least, not that, but the person he has to pretend to be. He doesn’t want … he doesn’t like…. Oh look! Let’s run!”
One end of the pleached alley was darkened by the figure of Corny, who had been sent to look for them. They fled down the leafy tunnel only to fall into the arms of Hugo who was coming in at the other end. Solange swerved to avoid him, but Marianne was caught, picked up, carried out into the moonlight, and set on her feet as if she had been a large doll. She did not resist. But when he released her she shook out her skirts and waited haughtily for an explanation.
“Grandma wants you,” said Hugo.
He was speaking, of course, in inverted commas, and she ought to have appreciated the audacious fantasy of it. Heaven help her if she supposed that he naturally talked like that, and saw no difference between Lady Geraldine and the grandmother of some brood at Gunnersbury. It was a bromide, so obvious that nobody ought to have been able to mistake it.
Marianne thanked him stiffly and walked away.
“The modern girl,” mused Hugo, looking after her, “has no sense of humour. No sense of humour at all. That’s another thing to remember about her. She is, as certain of the Americans say, dumb. She’s a dumb-bell.”
But was she?
“Tell me,” he said to the first fluttering frock that he met under the apple boughs, “tell me more about the modern girl.”
“Hugo?”
The flutterer was Philomena. He was not going to be let off.
Hesitation had never been one of Hugo’s failings. In a crisis he did not waver. Bitterly though he might regret his moment of folly, that abortive, misguided gesture towards escape, he had no intention of retreat. That would have been too foolish. He must go on as he had begun. Philomena was obviously expecting some kind of demonstration. He made it.
“Aggie,” she told him recklessly, “is waiting among the lilies.”
“Like somebody in a Victorian poem?” He dismissed Aggie. “Lilies always give me hay fever. Come into the moonlight, Philomena. I want to look at you.”
“I can’t stay now. I’ve got to play bridge. I just wanted to tell you that I’ve spoken to Gibbie.”
“Oh?”
He wanted to say:
“Gawd’s teeth!”
But he restrained himself, though he did think that she might have given him time to digest his dinner. As long as she was beside him, he could not find his position entirely regrettable.
She was such a rest from Aggie.
“And what did Gibbie say?” he asked, rather faintly.
He liked Gibbie. He ought to have kept out of this, liking Gibbie as he did. Now they would have to avoid each other at their Club. It was absurd. But his boats were burned. Entwining Philomena’s waist more firmly, he asked what Gibbie had said.
“I think he … understands.”
“What?”
“We’ve discussed it before, you know. And we both feel the same about these things. We don’t want to prevent each other from living as completely and beautifully as possible. I told him that I wouldn’t go with you unless he understood. I said I’d give you up if he hated it too much. Because you see, Hugo, I do put my home first. My home, and the children, and Gibbie. I’d have to go back to them eventually, you understand?”
“You mean that Gibbie doesn’t …”
“He did at first. But just now, when we came out into the garden, he said to me that he would try to understand, and not come between me and my happiness.”
Extraordinary fellow, thought Hugo, resentfully. For often, in unregenerate moments, he had thought how nice it would be to make love to Philomena. But he had always regarded Gibbie as an obstacle.
“Gibbie,” she explained, “is civilised. He doesn’t think he owns me. He’s liberal minded.”
Too damned liberal by half, agreed Hugo to himself. But then he remembered how liberal he had always been himself. He had written a play about a wife who made a very successful experiment of this sort. Having said and implied so much, in his time, about sexual freedom, he was bound to believe in it, and he made a great effort to think all the better of Gibbie. But certain early impressions die hard, and he found that he was thinking the worse of Gibbie. A deceived husband is by tradition an object of ridicule, but a complaisant husband ranks even lower.
He remained silent and meditative so long that Philomena began to feel uncomfortable. She grew oddly anxious to rectify any mistake that might have arisen about Gibbie’s manly spirit, and she explained that Gibbie had never been a person to stand any nonsense. He had his ideas of wifely duty and he expected her to live up to them. Hugo must not think that Gibbie would put up with anything.
“If he thought I wasn’t pulling my weight,” she boasted, “he’d leave me. He isn’t one of those men who let themselves be made fools of.”
Hugo gulped attentively. The situation was beyond him, so he left it alone. If he did nothing, and said nothing, but just went on pacing round the garden, something might happen to solve it all. He might wake up and find that he had dreamt it. Or Philomena might turn out to be pulling his leg. But her next words startled him.
“We’ll go at once,” she said.
“But darling …”
“If you can get away.”
“But darling … I can’t. I can’t possibly go away just now. Not right away. The rehearsals of Beggar My Neighbour begin next week.”
“Oh Hugo!”
She had forgotten that wretched play. Of course he could not go away. The whole thing would have to be postponed. And, now that she had spoken to Gibbie, postponement would be so uncomfortable.
“What are we going to do?” she asked mournfully.
He had skilfully guided her into the yew parlour, where the moon still lurked behind the black hedges and the distant hills were only the dimmest shadow against the sky. Turning to her, in the warm darkness, Hugo began to make the only possible reply. But she drew back.
“Not now, Hugo! Not till we can go away. I wouldn’t feel it was right.”
“You extraordinary woman!”
“It wouldn’t be fair to Gibbie. We must just be friends till then. And after we come back. Do you see?”
Hugo argued with her, and though he could not convince he came very near to overcoming her. Her feelings were stronger than her principles and Hugo was skilful at pressing his point. Indeed there is no knowing how far they might have got towards settling their difficulties had not Lady Geraldine appeared, drifted round the yew hedge, her lace veils catching on the branches. Peering without ceremony at the couple on the teak seat, she sank down beside them and asked if that was Mr. Usher?
“It’s Hugo,” explained Philomena, composing herself.
“Why do I want to call him … no, don’t move. There is plenty of room for three. Though I think poor Aggie is waiting for you, Mr. Swan. She has begun to pick all the lilies, and I’m afraid, if you don’t go soon, there won’t be one left. I said to her: ‘Aggie dear, why are you picking my lilies?’ And she said: ‘Well, why doesn’t he come? I want to rehearse with him.’ Poor Aggie is always so impatient, you know.”
Hugo, half glad and half sorry at the interruption, said that he would go. He hurried gracefully away, and the two ladies waited until the sound of his departing feet had sunk into the silence of the night. And then Lady Geraldine asked:
“What is that young man’s name?”
“Pott. Hugo Pott.”
“And I called him Edgar!”
“No, Geraldine. You called him Swan.”
“To remind myself that it isn’t Edgar. That man who wrote the House … the House of …”
Geraldine’s silvery voice, tuned to the moonlit dusk and the nightingales, sank pensively. But presently it rose again.
“Philomena. I don’t like to find people in compromising situations. Especially in the garden.”
“But Geraldine!”
“Kissing and cuddling, Philomena! I saw you. And you call yourself a respectable woman.”
“We love each other,” said Philomena defensively.
“I guessed as much. But that is no excuse.”
Philomena bit her lip with vexation. Geraldine, of all people, had not the faintest right to talk in this censorious strain. The Rivaz collection, as her seven children were called, could never have been accumulated without a certain amount of kissing and cuddling, in the garden or elsewhere. For in the family circle Otho, the Tyrant, was only credited with two of them: Mathilde the eldest, the mother of Marianne, and Dominick the youngest, born after Geraldine had taken a protracted tour through Central Africa alone with Otho, and some negro porters. It was the only time that she had shot big game too, and it was unfortunate for Dominick, for he had inherited the paternal bull neck. Mathilde and Dominick were indubitably Otho’s children. Whereas Beata, Lionel, Charles, Julian and Laura were all as handsome as they were varied in type. So that it was perfectly ridiculous for Geraldine to sit there, happed up in wedding veils and talking like a district visitor. She had done all that Philomena was too modern and civilised to do. She had deceived her husband frequently under his own roof, deceived him with the most blatant and expensive consequences, and all she cared for was a cynical parade of appearances. Probably she had had dozens of lovers, and now she was shocked and disapproving because Philomena contemplated one.
“Decorum,” she observed, as though she had been following her young cousin’s thoughts. “As long as you don’t underrate the importance of decorum you can do whatever you please. You can recite the Black Mass in Canterbury Cathedral and nobody will think of protesting, if you do it in an evangelical manner. I remember, when I was a young girl I heard a parson asked to say grace at my father’s house. I’m afraid he was not a very religious man, or else he must have been a little tipsy, for he got up and said: To all which, Oh Lord, we most strongly object. But, my dear, he said it in the right way, and nobody thought it odd. It was a lesson which I have never forgotten.”
“I don’t underrate decorum,” replied Philomena, with some spirit. “But I hate deception. I don’t intend to lie to my husband, even if it’s decorous. Gibbie knows everything. I daresay that may seem shocking to you. But at least it’s better than a life of furtive little intrigues.”
“Oh, undoubtedly,” agreed Lady Geraldine at once. “But tell me, Philomena dear, I’ve always wanted to know, how do you manage?”
“Manage?”
Philomena winced at the word. It was the idiom of an older generation, and it recalled a number of uncomfortable episodes. It implied a discreet concealment of the indecorous. One managed when one took small children on a long railway journey. Her romance was being reduced to the level of the nursery.
“I’m going away with Hugo,” she explained hastily. “Of course, there can be nothing between us while I am with Gibbie. And when we come back the whole thing will be over.”
“Over? Oh I see. But how wonderful to be able to know that!”
And Geraldine sighed. For she had a great admiration for women who knew when these things were over. Not to clutch, not to cling, to take lightly and to relinquish gracefully, how many tears had it not cost her to learn that!
“You’ll forgive these questions, my dear. Things are so different nowadays. And so you go away? Where?”
“I don’t know where yet,” said Philomena.
Something warned her that Geraldine was going to ask where she generally went, and she did not want to admit that she had never done such a thing before. So she hurried on.
“Don’t you feel that jealousy between husband and wife is a mistake?”
“It shows very limited interests,” agreed Geraldine. “But when are you going, then?”
“That depends. Hugo has a play coming on. I expect it will be about six weeks before he can get away.”
“Oh, has he? I thought they never began new plays at that time of year.”
“Most people don’t. But Hugo can. He says it will have settled nicely into its run by the autumn.”
“Six weeks? Dear me! That runs you very near to the summer. What are you doing about the children’s holidays?”
Philomena did not answer. For Geraldine knew as well as she did that the Greys were sharing a house in Skye with Beata. Philomena was to be there through August, in charge of both sets of children, while Beata was to take duty in September.
“Of course, Beata might exchange,” calculated Geraldine.
But her tone implied that everything would have to be explained to Beata before she would do it.
“I haven’t really made my plans,” said Philomena evasively.
Making plans, like managing, was another thing that the elderly did. Philomena hated making plans and thinking ahead. She had had so much of it, and of remembering not to ask anyone to dinner on a Thursday because it was cook’s night off, fixing September for Nannie’s holiday, and getting in enough food to last over Easter Monday. She would go mad unless she got away from it sometimes, and here she was, actually making plans in order to get away. She was thinking:
“I might squeeze it in between Hugo’s play and Skye if I can manage to get a new parlour-maid by then.”
Her holidays with Gibbie had always been snatched like that. They had been achieved in the face of obstacles, and liable to alteration if a boiler burst or a child came out in nettle rash. But to plan an unofficial honeymoon was monstrous.
“Perhaps it would be better to wait for the autumn,” suggested Geraldine helpfully. “Often you get such nice weather in October.”
Philomena jumped up and said that she was cold, and that Laura had said something about bridge. For if this went on five seconds longer she would lose heart.
In spite of Gibbie’s goodness, his undeniable generosity she could not help feeling that things were still very unfair. It was not as if other people did not succeed in doing these things. They happened every day without any obvious orgy of planning. But some people can act upon impulse and others cannot.
The flower garden was deserted. But as she passed the laurestinus hedge which veiled the kitchen wing she heard a frantic rattling and splashing. The unseen slaves were hurling themselves into the endless task of washing up. There was a whiff of steamy air and the impression of hot people working at break-neck speed. She hurried petulantly past, hating to be reminded of effort. There was too much effort everywhere. It was impossible, unless one had a lot of money, to pretend that life is a haphazard and impulsive thing. Even here, though carefully concealed behind laurestinus bushes, the basic effort was still present. And flowering shrubs are expensive. Gibbie could afford to pay servants, to transfer the real effort of his household to shoulders other than Philomena’s, but he could not afford to keep those shoulders out of sight. And the beautiful freedom upon which they had agreed was impracticable because it cost too much.