Some nine hours later the winter sun rose for the last time on George Simney. It rose, too, upon a day full of incident. Indeed, I have something to record of the very moment in which I opened my eyes.
At first I thought that Mervyn was prowling about my room; then I realized that it was Timmy Owdon. He had set down a tray and was putting considerable subdued rage into pulling back the curtains; the light caught his curls and the fine line of his nose; it was, after all, the best of the Simneys (I came wide awake reflecting) who had been born on the wrong side of the blanket.
This didn’t prevent my feeling annoyed. For one thing, Timmy was apt to remind me of that day when I had first met George and him out riding, and I could always reflect that if his beauty had not somehow set off George’s vigorous physical life I might have been spared landing myself in a scrape. Then, again, the meaning of Timmy’s being here was plain to me from previous experience. One or more of the housemaids had left in a hurry, and the boy had been turned on to the first necessary job. Whether newly promoted footmen are commonly given such tasks I don’t know – and on the preceding night it had rather been my impression that George designed to dismiss him to the outdoors again for good. But, anyway, here he was. I sat up, reached for a wrap, and poured tea. ‘Good morning, Timmy,’ I said. ‘Why is this?’
Timmy moved to the next window. ‘If you don’t like it,’ he said, ‘you can have Martin. Or so I would suppose. But her ladyship seems to hold it beneath her dignity to stir until you have to be got on your feet. That’s why it’s me. Nothing’s beneath my dignity, of course. I hope the tea’s all right. I made it.’
‘It’s the Lapsang,’ I said gratefully. ‘Have a piece of bread and butter.’
Timmy took a piece. He took a quick glance at the door and then sat down on the foot of the bed. ‘Oh, lord!’ he said.
When we were alone together this sultry boy and I were human beings. There was much impropriety in this, I don’t doubt. It had just happened.
‘How is Mervyn?’ I asked.
‘Bruises.’ Timmy’s voice held satisfaction. ‘But nothing broken and no sprains.’ This he added dejectedly.
I pushed towards him the second of the three slivers of bread and butter which he had brought in. ‘I don’t think you like Mervyn very much?’
‘I admire him.’
‘You mustn’t do that.’
‘I admire him. I am ignorant enough to admire him. He has been to a public school while I have groomed horses or cleaned knives.’
I laughed. ‘What’s the good of a public school? It means nothing but manners and an accent.’
Timmy Owdon looked up swiftly. ‘My accent is identical with his. And my manners are a great deal better.’
Both these statements, it occurred to me, were true. ‘Yes,’ I said gently, ‘–of course.’
‘These are facts which tell you a good deal about me.’ Timmy moved away the tray, jumped off the bed and brought me a hand mirror. ‘Would this be the next part of the ritual? Anyway, you will find it heartening.’
‘Heartening?’
‘You bear up very well.’ He smiled as he spoke, and his smile was at once wicked and friendly. ‘Your ladyship is quite an example to me. But then, of course, I am young enough to feel my position keenly.’ He frowned, as if catching in his own voice the echo of Mervyn’s self-conscious manner of speech. ‘Damn Mervyn.’ He flushed darkly. ‘I say – I’m frightfully sorry.’
‘Sorry, Timmy?’
‘For saying damn.’
I just managed not to laugh – and I should have very much hated myself otherwise. For I had stopped being annoyed. There are gentlemen and gentlemen, and Timmy Owdon belonged with a scarcer sort. ‘I think,’ I said, ‘that you know too much and not enough.’
‘Yes.’ He looked at me questioningly. ‘I suppose it is very unusual?’
‘Very. Lots of boys are born in that way, Timmy. But either their birth is concealed from them or they are given the breeding of their legitimate brothers – though perhaps at a distance.’
‘I see.’ He hesitated. ‘Of course I hate him a little – Sir George. But not tremendously – because of that. If – if anything ever happened, I would like you to know it was not because of that.’
I let the mirror drop on the bed. ‘Timmy,’ I said, ‘what do you mean?’
He looked at me directly – and suddenly with flashing eyes. ‘They say it was my mother,’ he said. ‘But do I really know about my father – though Owdon is my name? It may have been the other way. He may be my father – Sir George. Nicolette, how I wish I could be sure that he was not.’
I was startled by this – both by the boy’s obliviously calling me Nicolette, and by the marked impression of breeding which he gave, and by the obscure tenor of his words. But instead of inquiring into these (as I ought perhaps to have done) I changed to a less awkward topic. ‘There was a row last night,’ I said.
Timmy nodded. ‘That is why a fool of a girl called Mary has left. I shall miss her rather, because I used to kiss her quite a lot. Do you think that cheap?’
This time I did laugh – we were getting on well enough for that. ‘No, Timmy, I don’t. Only don’t ever positively seduce a virgin without thinking hard and long. It’s incalculable.’
He looked at me with a faint flush and knit his brows, considering. ‘Do you know,’ he said anxiously, ‘I can’t promise?’
‘Certainly you can’t. You wouldn’t be a Simney if you could.’
‘You think I have a rotten heredity?’
I found this difficult. ‘Heredity,’ I said (not altogether honestly), ‘is just a bit of jargon you’ve picked up from your books. And, anyway, you’re good enough to kiss as many Marys as we can crowd into the servants’ hall.’
Timmy flushed darkly and I cursed myself for a fool. The turn of that phrase had been altogether wrong. ‘But why,’ I asked quickly, ‘did the little goose leave?’
‘It wasn’t Sir George. I mean, not particularly. All that breaking of stuff last night, and then everybody knowing that Mervyn had been thrown through a window. She just said it wasn’t good service, and she would tell them so at the registry office in town.’ Timmy paused. ‘You know, things are getting a bit hot. This blacksmith’s daughter in the village. The parson has been getting worked up.’
‘But that’s quite in the run of things here.’
Timmy looked slightly shocked. His knowledge of the world was insufficient to tell him how in such situations one must grow a shell, and he thought me hard, I suppose. But the truth was that I had more to think of than the blacksmith’s daughter, and at that moment I was thinking of Timmy himself. If he were George’s son the whole thing could have been kept as obscure as you please. But if Owdon were indeed his father, and his mother some unhappy lady of the family, how could the episode have been so successfully wrapped in mystery? I had found no answer to this when Timmy startled me once more.
‘You see,’ he said, ‘it’s Willoughby too.’
‘Willoughby?’
‘He was painting the girl – this blacksmith’s daughter. She’s very striking, but not what you could call pretty. Sir George butted in just to annoy.’
‘Timmy, it doesn’t get anywhere telling me these things. The only result is to make me feel like Grace. There seems to be just nothing on the horizon but these silly, shoddy, sexy scandals.’
‘But there is. There’s I don’t know what blowing up. You know the expression about there being bad blood between relations? Well, when the blood that there is badness between is bad itself – and Simney blood is bad–’
‘Timmy, I think you’d better run along. You’re being an old Jonah.’
‘No I’m not.’ He was very serious. ‘I feel the devil in myself, for one thing. It’s since I came into the house and saw that Sir George – and saw that you…’
He broke off, confused, and with a fearful rage in his eyes that told me a great deal. ‘Timmy,’ I said sharply, ‘I can look after myself. I’m doing so. You would only–’
‘If only I knew,’ he said. ‘If only I knew that he wasn’t my–’
‘You’re being melodramatic. It’s the result of long-lost cousins coming back with some mystery from Australia. And now you’re going to stop it.’ I must have spoken with something like vehemence, for I think I was almost frightened.
Timmy looked crestfallen and for a moment this comforted me. Then professional instinct quickened my scrutiny; I saw that the penitent face before me was a mask; and at that I really was frightened all through. I put out my hand to him. ‘Timmy,’ I said, ‘stop it. And listen. If I need help from anyone in this household, I’ll come to you.’
‘Is that a promise?’ He flushed. ‘I’m – I’m only sixteen.’
‘It’s a promise that I’ll come to you. And now be off. Clean knives. Polish Mrs Gerard’s exquisite Australian shoes.’
Timmy Owdon sprang to his feet, and his face was radiant with its wicked, eager smile. ‘Your ladyship,’ he said, ‘should be about and caring for your guests. I will send your ladyship’s ladyship as fast as a stick can drive her up the back stairs.’
And he was gone. I finished my tea and stared blankly into the empty cup. One cannot hold such a conversation as this with a houseboy – even though he be obscurely one of the family – without feeling oneself amid a dreamlike and altogether impermanent scene of things.
Mervyn kept his bed that morning; Owdon, as befitted his dignity, was not in attendance at breakfast; but everybody else was there – including Timmy, who took round coffee like an automaton. I concluded that George had judged it futile, after all, to attempt to conceal him from the Australians (and why he had in the first case been prompted to do so I could not guess), and had therefore rescinded his banishment. That everyone should appear at once was slightly surprising after the events of the night before; one would have predicted that the family would slip in one by one after cautious reconnaissance and snatch a kipper to gnaw in the garden. But there they all were in a rather distrustful circle – and Lucy passed me the marmalade.
A good deal can be put into passing the marmalade: adoration, cordiality, indifference, distaste. But what Lucy put in was hate – which is an altogether different matter. Just how she contrived it I could not now describe, but the impression was vivid enough at the time and wholly unambiguous. It was the more surprising, too, because – so far as I was aware – it was something quite new in our relations. Between sisters-in-law, I suppose, there must always be undercurrents of animosity; and these will be definite where it is a matter of a resident sister-in-law in such a queer household as ours. But why (I asked myself while doing what justice I could to marmalade so delivered) hate? Was it because she credited me with inspiring Gerard to pitch her precious Mervyn out of the window? Almost certainly it had to do with Mervyn in some way. For except in relation to Mervyn Lucy was surely incapable of any intensity whatever; she was a stupid, vague creature except when touched off at this one point of maternal solicitude. But here she was suddenly hating me – and (I could have sworn) studying my complexion. It was unnerving. And although the riddle had its obvious solution this just didn’t occur to me. Perhaps I was too preoccupied with Gerard.
This was because Gerard was too preoccupied with me. Timmy had made me a bit edgy and I was reckoning that one would-be protector was a little more than enough. Yet here was Gerard so carefully not looking at me that he was obviously meditating both me and my position in the household all the time. Perhaps he was intelligent enough to be wondering not only how on earth I got there but why on earth I stayed. Even in the great Australian out-back wives are presumably not serfs – so why should they be so on the estate of an English baronet? Yes, perhaps Gerard was meditating that. And last night he had been, after all, rather unnecessarily helpful. Mervyn might very well have been let alone… Gerard, who was likeable, could (I saw) also be indiscreet. And he looked as if he might be taking Timmy’s line on Lady Simney – and that on the strength of an uncommonly short acquaintance.
It is quite nauseous to be representing myself as a typical femme fatale – particularly if this aspect of the mystery is likely to prove to some extent a mare’s nest. And I turned now for a little relief to young Willoughby, who had always been completely negative in all his approaches to me. Vanity is nauseous too, and I must record that for a long time I attributed this disregard of Willoughby’s to the fact that we usually met in the presence of his father, and that before his father he thought it discreet to appear emotionally numb. But now as I looked at Willoughby I realized how Hazelwood – and perhaps the world at large – had corrupted me; I couldn’t look at a man without thinking of him as thinking about a woman. Whereas men have a good many other things to think about. Or rather the conjoined clamorousness and futility of the woman-business obliges them to think of other things for the sake of sanity. Hence the world’s achievement of what is called culture. And hence the brooding and abstracted quality in Willoughby’s eye. He was thinking of a girl down in the village – but thinking of her in terms of mass and tint and hue. This was the simple truth about Willoughby at present. He was a young painter struggling to get going in an ungenial environment, and he wasn’t giving time to other things. I ought to have liked Willoughby for this, for I know very well what it is to be struggling to get down to a job. And yet I didn’t like Willoughby very much. I liked him only a little better than Bevis – who would certainly never meditate mass and tint and hue, nor approve of his son’s doing so – and who was now treating Hippias to a blameless dissertation on the cross-fertilization of wheat.
I looked at George. And it came to me uncertainly that he was indeed in some obscure way cornered, and that he was resolved to go down with flying colours. Or perhaps it would be better to say that he was resolved to go down with another feather in his cap. Joyleen was feather-headed enough, heaven knows.
George was experienced. On what was only a rudimentary problem he expended only a rudimentary technique. Last night he had given the girl one look and then ignored her; this morning he was all over her with everything a bad baronet can muster. He talked horses; it became evident that Bondi has a substantial acquaintance with the brutes; presently the affair turned from trot to canter and from canter to shameless gallop. And no sooner was this accomplished metaphorically than it was repeated in actual fact. Within half an hour of first putting fork to bacon Joyleen was standing in the hall in riding things. And within ten minutes of that again the two of them were disappearing through the park. Joyleen was mounted on my mare.
Bevis continued to play the gentleman farmer. And Hippias, who this morning was thoughtful if not subdued, made civil replies. But Hippias was not unaware of what had occurred, and I could see him look sidelong at his son with a speculative eye.
Whether Gerard was learning anything it was impossible to say. If these people had come from Australia on some great rackety mailboat (as I suppose they had) it would be a fair guess that he had seen Joyleen show a clean pair of heels like this often enough. But now it did seem to me as if he was startled; perhaps he didn’t reckon on a host and elderly cousin behaving so forthrightly like a casual lounger on a liner. But certainly he wasn’t absorbed in this disagreeable business to the exclusion of all else. Gerard (as I’ve said before) was turning me over in his mind; as far as he was concerned I was Hazelwood’s principal mystery, and whatever had been on the carpet the night before took distinctly a second place. That he should thus be as much and as rapidly concerned with George’s wife as George was with his was piquant enough in a way, and the fact that Gerard’s interest was no doubt as blameless-seeming to himself as George’s was downright carnal only refined upon the situation when viewed in a comic light. But I was far from wanting to invoke the Comic Spirit over Hazelwood that day. And I particularly didn’t want to be meditated as a mystery.
My first impulse was simply to clear out for the morning. And, as a matter of fact, that was what I presently did. But, of course, running away is never much good. There is that book of Conrad’s in which it is only the coward who comes to a really nasty end. And when I did run away it was to bump into something at least a good deal nastier than if I had stayed put.
First, however, I decided to have it out with Gerard. I wanted to explain to him quite simply that I was not a captive princess guarded by an ogre; that I was just not to be regarded as interesting in that way; that I distinctly liked him here and now but saw no future for him as a knight-errant… And to create an opportunity for the delivery of this little homily I led Gerard off to look at the orangery.
When we got there I ought to have plunged straight ahead. The thing could only be said pretty baldly and I ought to have submitted to that. But for a fatal half-minute I beat about the bush – and in that short time lost ground which I had to struggle to recover. I don’t mean that I at all felt like falling in love with this Australian Simney; but I did feel in him a simple human warmth which made me baulk rather at my frosty programme. Gerard was like a genuine piece of warmth amid the artificial climate – the product of steam-heating – into which I had led him. Incidentally it was the orangery, and the wilderness of greenhouses beyond, which gave him the initiative. He laughed at them.
Gerard looked at the orange trees and palms beneath their immense cupola of glass and chuckled. He looked at the long corridors of glass with their closely pruned vines and laughed outright. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I know that it is quite august to have an orangery. And quite silly to be amused at it merely because in one’s own country oranges and lemons grow in the back yard, and muscatels proliferate like a pest in suburban gardens, and housewives work frantically to turn a fraction of their peaches into jam. Our schoolbooks, which are filled with the colonial inferiority complex, loudly assert that England is very cold and very grey and very wet – whereas we have summer skies that sparkle with a myriad dyes. It is very absurd, and undoubtedly your Nordic climate is both an economic and a spiritual asset. But what about the emotions? Of course there are plenty of robustly animal ones galloping about.’ And Gerard’s glance went out through the steamy glass of the orangery and across the snow-covered park. ‘But others must sometimes grow discouraged, I think, and harbour under ground.’ He turned back and looked at me. ‘More discouraged than the snowdrops, that will, after all, still thrust a single slender green spear through.’
Well, that was that. Gerard, like Timmy, thought me hard. And Gerard himself was perhaps ever so slightly soft – or at least subject to little eddies of poetical feeling which manifested themselves in ‘an uncolonial cadence. I looked at him cautiously. He wasn’t deliberately leading to anything with this talk – in this more honest than myself, who had been proposing to edge in something I designed to say.
So again I was checked for a moment. And again he got ahead of me. And with the same spontaneity.
‘Do you believe in fidelity?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘There is a sense in which it is unnatural. We are none of us so faithful as we think. They say – psychologists who study such things – that it is just a matter of having thicker skins.’
I looked at Gerard in perplexity. ‘Thicker skins?’
‘Just that. A thicker skin of morality, or of the socially sanctioned attitudes, covering the hopeless natural promiscuity of the hidden man. What do you think of that?’
This was not the sort of talk I wanted; nevertheless I found myself considering his question carefully. ‘Without his skin,’ I said, ‘a man would be disagreeable. He would also be dead. In fact, he wouldn’t be a man. He would be a not-man.’
No doubt this was a wisp of donnish wisdom from my abortive Oxford days. But Gerard seemed to suppose that I had won it from a void. ‘That’s just it,’ he said. ‘But I could never have put it in that way.’ Once more he looked out across the park into which George and Joyleen had vanished. ‘Did you ever think of Australia?’ he asked.
‘Not, I’m afraid, very much. Or not until last night.’
‘I mean, of possibly living there?’
This was a bit of a jolt. I looked at him squarely. ‘You mean that fidelity might make a better show in a second innings?’
‘Something like that. At my prep school we never counted the first ball. It was called a trialer.’ Gerard paused and rubbed a little steam from the glass in front of us. We were both looking at the empty park. ‘Those people,’ he said, matter-of-factly, ‘are gone, after all.’
I think it must be admitted that in this encounter Gerard Simney had me licked. He came straight at you, as Simneys do. Once upon a time George – if on something a different level – had licked me with the same quality.
But it must not be concluded from this that I was remotely moved to proceed upstairs and pack a suitcase (as somebody else, you will presently discover, was at that moment doing). For I really was more discouraged than the snowdrops. Indeed, this is one of the few facts that are constant and unchallengeable throughout the whole fluid George Simney affair so far. After Christopher I was finished. And George himself had been no more than the proof of that.
I was taken unawares, and I was distressed. But I was also, I’m afraid, amused – and I must have looked at Gerard with a startled smile that his small experience took for heaven knows what. The next moment I was in his arms – and feeling unutterably clumsy at having provoked that honest, unmeaning embrace. I kissed him gently and pushed him away. ‘My dear,’ I said, ‘you’ve got it utterly–’
Something like a scream of rage interrupted me, and we turned to see Grace goggling and frothing at us absurdly from behind a palm-tree. It was like an apparition – for a moment later she was gone.
We looked at each other. There was nothing for it but a good many awkward and explaining words. I just wasn’t going to have Gerard feeling abased. Twenty minutes later we parted, very good friends.