It is now more than thirty-five years since Tom Blackwood and I, travelling home from London on a fine late June evening, by slow train, met the fabulous Mrs. V. for the first time.
It was one of those warm pellucid evenings that have a breathless and suspended aura about them and it would have been memorable even if Mrs. V. hadn’t made it so. The train on that particular Midland line passes time after time over a broad slow river and that evening all the meadows had about them the green tranquillity of some old and eternal pastoral. Even the cows in them looked like classical figures and in the quieter reaches of river the many wide stretches of pure white water-lilies looked strangely uplifted, as if about to take to air.
We were travelling by slow train because, after stopping to see the end of a film, we had missed the express. I continually fret about trains. To me it seems almost immoral to miss one. Tom, however, was the sort of man who, having paid for a thing, found it immoral, in his own way, not to consume it to the last crumb. He was exceedingly obstinate in the politest sort of way.
You saw this in his face. He was a big muscular young man with strong burning brown eyes, a big square jaw and massive cheek-bones that might have been sculptured out of reddish rock. A shock of stiff dark hair gave him a look of almost quarrelsome aggression completely belied by his mouth, which was very sensitive, and his voice, which was slow and soft except when he laughed. Then it started tripping over itself, rather like a puppy having fun with string. And it was that laugh, I think, that endeared him so much to everybody—particularly, as it turned out, to the fabulous Mrs. V.
We played a lot of tennis together, Tom and I. His wrists and forearms were the steeliest I have ever seen in a man. He didn’t merely hit the ball. He cleaved at it with fury, as with a meat axe. The result was that I was proud if I took off him more than one set in twenty. I simply wasn’t in his class. And it was part of the beauty of his nature that he didn’t care.
We were in fact talking about tennis when the train pulled slowly into a place called Sturvey, the last station but two before we were home. As the train stopped I caught sight of a woman, fortyish I supposed, in a smart white dress, a small carmine straw hat and a pink veil walking quickly up the platform, peering into carriages as if looking for someone. She walked twice up and down the train and then, at the very last moment, just as the guard’s whistle blew, she suddenly wrenched open our carriage door and got in with us.
She sat down on the far side of the carriage, crossed her elegant legs with cool deliberation and let her skirt ride above the exposed knee-cap. Tom and I stopped talking and I felt myself holding my breath. Behind the pink veil her eyes were so blue and brilliant, almost vitriolic, that I couldn’t look at her for more than a second or two. Instead I looked back at Tom and I could see that he too was holding his breath.
‘Oh! isn’t this first class?’ she suddenly said. ‘This carriage?’
Tom said he was afraid it wasn’t, and in a high, vexatious voice she said ‘How awfully stupid,’ rather as if implying either that the carriages themselves were stupid not to have got themselves elevated to her requirements or that Tom and I were somehow responsible.
‘You can always change at the next station,’ I said. ‘It won’t be five minutes.’
‘Thank you,’ she said.
As she said this she didn’t look at me. She deliberately looked at Tom. And I thought the look on her face was that of a woman who had suddenly seen something in a shop-window that she desperately wanted.
For a minute or so there was an almost indecent hush on the carriage and then Tom actually let out a difficult sort of sigh and said:
‘Well, we’ll do that then, shall we? You book the court for three o’clock Saturday afternoon and I’ll ring up Daphne and Lois to see if they’ll make up the four.’
‘What if Lois can’t come? She sounded awfully doubtful when I saw her. Should we ask Kay?’
‘Oh! Kay’s so flabby. She doesn’t even try. She’s always such a passenger.’
All the time our other passenger sat listening; you could almost hear her breathing into your mind; and then suddenly, while Tom and I were still discussing who might substitute for Lois if Lois couldn’t come, she said:
‘Do forgive me, but I hear you boys talking about tennis. Do you play a lot?’
We said we did; we were mad on tennis.
‘And I’m sure you’re awfully good at it too.’
I said Tom was terrific; I just did the best I could.
‘I can see he would be.’
Again she looked at Tom in that brilliant covetous fashion of hers but the odd thing was that he didn’t seem to notice it. Nor did the significance of those half dozen simple words of hers seem to strike him either.
Then with the most disarming sweetness she smiled and said:
‘You’ll probably think I’m poking my nose in, but I just wondered if you’d care to make up a party with us some time? I live at Vane Court. We play practically every evening and always on Sundays.’
Sundays? We found ourselves listening hard. It was still something of an adventure, in our stuffy, chapel-ridden little town, to play tennis on Sundays. It was still something to be done in secrecy.
‘There’s absolutely no formality,’ she said. ‘We dispense with all that. Just roll up. Don’t even bother to telephone.’
We both started to thank her very much when she said:
‘My daughter will be absolutely thrilled when I tell her you’re coming. We can never get enough young people. And she loathes playing with a lot of old fuddy-duddies.’
Tom laughed, in that typical puppy-string fashion of his, and I could see that it got her. It was impossible for her brilliant blue eyes to light up any further, they were so intensely and vividly transparent already, but I saw the corners of her mouth suddenly twitch.
‘We usually start about three o’clock on Sundays,’ she said. ‘That gives the old fuddy-duddies a chance to nap and the young folk to get in a decent set or two before tea.’
I don’t know why, but I got the impression that she didn’t include herself with the fuddy-duddies. She was very much with the young.
‘If it’s good weather we go on playing until about eight,’ she said, ‘and then we all have supper in the garden. It makes a nice ending for the day.’
Tom, with that enormous frame of his, was constantly ravaged by raving hunger, and he laughed again, I supposed from sheer joy at the thought of food, and again I saw her stir.
‘Now you will come, won’t you?’ she said. ‘I mean it. It’s an invitation. You won’t let me down?’
Oh! we were certainly coming, we said; we meant it too; we wouldn’t let her down.
‘Promise?’
With an almost paralysing directness she looked straight at Tom. In a confused fashion he repeated the word promise and then laughed again.
‘Splendid,’ she said. ‘Joy will be so excited.’
Joy, I assumed, was the daughter and suddenly, as on an illuminated slide, my mind’s eye saw her: blue, brilliant, disarming, vivacious, elegant, a younger edition of the mother. It was all going to be pretty terrific fun, I kept telling myself, a thought that Tom could hardly wait to echo, half a minute after we had reached our destination and she had waved us the friendliest, most vivid of goodbyes.
‘By God, she’s fabulous,’ Tom kept saying. ‘Absolutely fabulous.’
‘Damn fools,’ I suddenly said. ‘We forgot to ask her name.’
‘I got an idea it’s Vane. Didn’t she say Vane Court? She did. I’m sure that’s it. I’ll ask my father. He’ll know.’
‘We’ll call her Mrs. V.’
‘That’s it,’ he said, laughing again. ‘Mrs. V. The fabulous Mrs. V.’
‘There’s a daughter too, remember.’
‘By God, the fabulous Miss V. too. So there is. I’d almost forgotten her. Gosh, if the daughter’s anything like the mother you’re going to have a pretty terrific time.’
‘Me? Why me?’
‘Oh! I’ll make you a present of the daughter,’ Tom said and once again laughed, the puppy-string notes seeming to mock his huge frame and tie him in knots of delight. ‘I’ll settle for the mother. The fabulous Mrs. V.’
We both laughed heartily at this; after all, we were young and gay.
The following Sunday afternoon, about half past three, we turned up at Vane Court in Tom’s old open Ford, looking and feeling like a pair of half-impudent, vainglorious cockatoos.
Tom had actually bought himself a new blazer for the occasion, a coat of many colours, a fetching affair of daffodil-yellow, crimson, chocolate and purple stripes, with a silk neckerchief of brightest purple to match. I was wearing a blazer too, a thing of white and scarlet stripes, with a silk muffler of red and cream. We were both very brown from much tennis in the sun and Tom, I thought, looked as handsome as a steel-gold god.
The day was hot and Vane Court, which was one of those big ugly Victorian houses with ecclesiastical bay windows built of brick and terra-cotta, had a scorched appearance in the sun. Large lawns, with clumps of rhododendron and here and there a big acacia or two and one gigantic elm, surrounded it. Farther away was a big ornamental pond, almost a lake, and about equidistant between it and the house lay the tennis lawn.
A rather half-hearted mixed doubles was in progress as Tom and I arrived. The air rippled with shouts of laughter and encouraging cries such as ‘Played, partner!’ The two men—I recognised one as a bank-clerk named Aitcheson, a stumpy little man with a head bald as a melon—were playing the game with a combination of deadly decorum and masculine craftiness. Low cut spinners crept over the net. The differences of sex were being heavily respected. It was what Tom called a giggle.
About seven or eight men and women were sitting in deck chairs in the shade of the big elm and as we walked across the lawns the figure of the fabulous Mrs. V., in a very low-necked cream shantung tennis frock, sprang up to meet us.
‘I’d given you up. I’d really given you up. I said “those naughty boys—”’
This rapturous greeting actually made Tom blush. He started apologetically to explain that he’d had trouble with his car’s petrol pump but she cut him off with gay laughter.
‘As long as you’re here, that’s the thing. As long as you’re here. And stupid me. I quite forgot to ask your names the other evening. Ours is Varley. Now tell me yours and I’ll introduce you.’
Tom dealt with the formal business of the names and we followed her over to the elm. In her low-necked frock, which exposed a shell-like inch or two of breast, she looked if anything more elegant, more captivating and more brilliant than ever: except for one thing. I noticed that, without her veil, the eyes that had formerly seemed so vivid now looked rather weak. It was exactly the sort of impression you get when an habitual spectacle-wearer takes off his glasses. Suddenly a new person becomes revealed.
Under the tree sat the fuddy-duddies and a pretty dull-looking crowd they were. I recognised a man named Dickson who sang in the local operatic society in a mousy sort of tenor; and another named Smythe, a craggy grey schoolmaster who wore starched butterfly collars even when playing tennis; and two owl-eyed sisters, also school-teachers, a pair of podgy dumplings with the odd name of Spong—rather as if they had originally been Sponge and out of shame had dropped the final letter.
One by one Mrs. V. introduced us all. The air was briefly charged with mumbles. It was almost as if Mrs. V. had chosen this dull, dispirited crowd on purpose, simply in order that she alone should shine. And then she said:
‘And this is Mr. Varley.’
A figure wearing a white shirt buttoned at neck and sleeves and cream trousers with a faint black pin-stripe and a green cummerbund creaked to its feet.
‘Dee-do.’
Mr. Varley had the look of an ageing innocent: a pale crinkled babe who grinned emptily. His hands and pale grey eyes quivered like half-set jelly. It suddenly occurred to me that this emasculated figure must surely be her father when she said:
‘My husband is dying to make up a really good men’s doubles. Aren’t you, Lamby?’
‘Me?’
Without another word she left him in mid-air and he stood there as if whipped, sitting bleakly in his trousers.
‘And this,’ she suddenly said, ‘is Joy.’
I stared. Tom stared too. Frantically I wondered by what wicked chance, or mischance, Mrs. Varley had named her daughter Joy. I had never in my life seen anything less like Joy than the girl who stood before me.
It wasn’t merely that she was plain. It wasn’t just that she looked lost and sombre. The straight bobbed brown hair and the turgid brown eyes had nothing to do with it; nor the colourless skin, not unlike the thick inner skin of orange peel; nor the infantile nature of her coffee-coloured tennis frock, with its smocking high at the chest, giving her the air of being utterly flat from neck to toe.
It was something much more elusive. I know now what it was; but as I stood there that hot afternoon, frantically wondering and searching for something to say, I could only feel that somehow, somewhere, something in her had been remorselessly suppressed. The blood of growing up had been tapped.
Long afterwards Tom said to me ‘If I’d have had any guts at all I’d have run for my life, but I just stood there.’
I just stood there too, not knowing what to say. All of a sudden I felt inexpressibly foolish, vain, impudent, contemptible. Our cockatoo-ish blazers were suddenly a mockery. This was the girl, blue-eyed, elegant, vitriolic, enchanting, vivacious, of whom Tom in his gay generosity had made me a present. In our moment of disenchantment I didn’t know who I hated most, myself or Tom.
Then Mrs. Varley said:
‘Joy is dying to play with you, too, aren’t you, Joy?’
‘I suppose I am, really. Yes.’
The voice was joyless too.
‘And needless to say I am.’ Mrs. Varley turned on us both a gaze of brilliant, glassy flattery. ‘Of course I’ll be no match for you. I see that. How shall we pair?’
I knew what Tom was dreading; I was dreading it too. But the trap was open; we were in it; there wasn’t any escaping.
Finally, as we walked on court, about four o’clock, Tom partnered by Mrs. Varley, myself by Joy, I didn’t hate Tom or myself any longer. I was merely mute of dejection.
In such circumstances my eyesight, normally microscopically good, starts going to pieces. I knew suddenly, during the knock-up, that I wasn’t really going to see the ball.
‘You serve, Tom,’ I said. ‘I’ll give it to you.’
Normally he would have bantered back at me for that, but he didn’t say a word. He just picked up the balls—he always held three of them in his enormous hands—and got ready to serve at me. I knew what was coming. Tom didn’t see tennis as a tea-party graced with polite discrimination between the sexes. Girls who played against him knew perfectly well they were going to be cannon-balled. If they didn’t like it they could do the other.
The first service went past me like the customary white stunning bullet I knew so well, but if anything steelier and faster. My eyes wobbled; I couldn’t touch it. It drew a faint involuntary ‘Oh!’ from the girl and nothing but the low flicker of a smile from her mother. Under the elm-tree the fuddy-duddies gave a communal gasp at the impact of the explosion and then chattered among themselves, with a sound like that of gnashing teeth.
I could only guess what agonies were grinding through Tom as he crossed over and got ready to serve again. It wasn’t really in his nature to compromise; he was too stubborn for that; on the other hand he was too sensitive, as very big powerful men often are, to hurt.
He served. The ball scorched across the court like a fiery snowball. In some miraculous way the girl got her racquet to it and the sheer force of the blow spun it from her hand like a shuttlecock. Without wasting time Tom got ready to serve again, as if he had already decided that murder was the most merciful way with agony. Even as he did so I saw, to my infinite astonishment, that Mrs. Varley smiled.
After that I managed to get the next ball back across the net and we had a bit of a rally. In the course of it Mrs. Varley was revealed to be remarkably good. She concentrated, sprinted with elegance, retrieved the impossible and had style. I got the impression that she was on stage, enjoying herself. Her beautiful figure had an irrepressible youthfulness about it and she finished off the rally with a sliced smash that beat me completely and that I was moved to praise aloud when suddenly, once again, I saw her smile.
From then on, throughout the remaining half hour of agony, a new hatred started smouldering up in me. Anger also affects my sight and as the game went on I saw less and less of the ball. At the same time I took on a sort of protective role, poaching, playing high drop shots, trying to slow the game down. Once, in a pathetic mid-court mix-up, the girl and I clashed racquets and for a second or two she gave me a stare of piteously innocent apology, eyes cowed with anguish.
‘Sorry,’ she said and I knew that my crass incompetence had simply doubled her own.
I won’t go into the rest of that long hot evening except for a single incident. After we had played more sets, had drinks and a shower we finished up with supper on the terrace. It was a buffet affair and you fetched your food from a long main table and then sat about where you liked, on the terrace steps, on the grass, on chairs.
Some time before supper was ready Mrs. Varley disappeared into the house. The girl had disappeared too and Tom and I were left for some time to the desultory mumblings of the fuddy-duddies. At one point Tom and I were actually sitting on the grass when Mr. Varley came over to us and, with innocent croakings, warned us of the dangers of this awful practice.
‘We’re all right, sir,’ Tom said. ‘We’re pretty hardy.’
‘Oh! no you’re not. It’s most dangerous.’
‘But there’s been no rain for weeks.’
‘Even so there’s always damp in the earth. You’ll both catch cold.’
Reluctantly we got up and Tom said:
‘By the way, sir, have you seen anything of Joy? She seems to have disappeared.’
‘I fancy I saw her walking down to the lake.’
‘Let’s take a stroll and find her,’ Tom said.
‘Good idea,’ Mr. Varley said. ‘It will do you a sight more good than sitting on damp grass.’
We walked across the lawns; the evening was wonderfully embalmed in a soft apricot light. Half way to the lake I started to sense an inner disturbance in Tom. I was still some way from knowing the full measure of his pain about that afternoon but much later he said to me:
‘It was like crucifying her there on that court. I tell you it was like a bloody crucification.’
‘Look,’ I said suddenly. ‘You go on. You find her.’
I strolled slowly back to the house. A rising sense of guilt about everything, combined with an intense irritation about the fabulous Mrs. V. had put me into a mood when I felt I hated everything about the place: the ugly terra-cotta, the parochial-looking lawns, the fuddy-duddies, the baby-faced Mr. Varley, the general air of stuffiness.
‘Once is enough of this,’ I told myself. ‘We’ll not come here again.’
I walked up the steps and on to the terrace. Among the waiting guests there was no sign of Mrs. V., but presently I heard a voice say ‘Ah! there she is,’ and I turned towards the door of the house to see a vision in fluffy flax-blue and a pink-and-red chinese wrap worked over in a design of flowers and dragons making her entrance on to the terrace stage.
Over-dressed but ravishing, the swing of the arms exaggerated but the face as cool as marble, she advanced among us like a queen for whom we, her lackeys, had been waiting. The falsity of the shallow blue eyes filled me with an infuriated desire to commit some ghastly breach of manners, such as giving a laugh of loud sarcastic candour, but as it was I merely stared impotently.
‘I’ve been scolding the young men for sitting on the grass,’ Mr. Varley said to her with babyish glee, as if this were his good deed for the day.
‘They wouldn’t have to sit on the grass if you’d see there were chairs enough,’ she said. ‘Go and get more chairs.’
Humbly he fled, not merely across the terrace but beyond the outer fringes of my speculation. I could only guess how long ago she had broken him.
‘I see you’re here,’ she said to me, ‘but where’s Tom?’
I told her. Her face froze. The fact that she too now looked impotent with irritation filled me with my own particular sort of glee.
‘They’ve no right to go off like that when they know it’s supper time.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘They’re old enough to look after themselves.’
The look she gave me was so savagely resentful that I might have discovered her naked. To my infinite surprise it made her look maddeningly attractive. The cold eyes were suddenly filled with fire.
A moment later she simply turned her back on me with a shrug of furious frigidity, hitching her wrap higher about her shoulders. As she did so all my nerves tingled. The pink and scarlet dragons mocked me. Across the terrace one of the Varley housemaids dropped a fork and it clattered ringingly on to the stone flags like a challenging sword.
I had never been in the position of hating an attractive woman before and it coloured all my thoughts and emotions as, two hours later, Tom and I drove home in the summer darkness.
‘I’ll be damned if I ever go there again,’ I said. ‘What a crowd. That bumbling snob Aitcheson. That self-opinionated beetle—the dark chap, stockbroker, what’s his name? And the women—by God, the women, Tom, the women.’
Tom remained thoughtful. When he spoke at last it was with a level and quite unintentional air of reproach that maddened me afresh.
‘You do what you like, of course,’ he said. ‘But I shall be going again. As often as they’ll have me.’
For the remaining two months of that summer we went over to Vane Court two or three or sometimes even four evenings a week and always on Sundays. For the most part we went together, but just occasionally Tom was there alone. I myself went alone just once, but that was much later.
Tom’s atonement for that first Sunday crucifixion took the form of deepening gentleness. He was normally a buoyant, laughing man, exuberant of health, quick-witted, full of boundless athletic charm. Girls, very naturally, adored him and between us we knew some beautiful ones.
But now he turned to Joy. At first I thought it merely a matter of pity. He was sorry for her; I was sorry for her myself. Then I began to notice little things, infinitesimal gestures and intonations, small covert acts, that put it in a different light for me.
The strange thing was—or perhaps it wasn’t very strange—that the fabulous Mrs. V. didn’t appear to notice these things. It was exactly as if she was emotionally colour-blind. To me, as the summer went on, Joy Varley appeared like a long-darkened window with a sudden light in it. It was equally impossible to miss the flowering of devotion in Tom as he brought cups of tea to her, moved chairs, fetched wraps, carried racquets and gradually, with great patience, even taught her to play tennis well.
The very nature of all this was quite unobtrusive. Young love so often erupts with violent physical enthusiasm that it perhaps wasn’t so very surprising that Mrs. Varley mistook it all for a purely platonic sort of all-play-games-together affair. It was pure all right; but the fires were burning darkly.
Nevertheless it still astonishes me that she didn’t notice other things, subtle though they were. Exactly as she had broken Lamby—I once called him Baby Lamb, but Tom took it coldly—so she had successfully barred Joy behind the door of childhood. The girl of nearly twenty-four had looked, on that first Sunday afternoon, in the agony of her crucifixion, not much more than sixteen: infinitely gauche, clumsy as a fledgling pushed from a nest, piteously unawoken.
Now she began to grow up. The neck line of her dresses gradually lowered a little; the hems of her dresses rose. The flatness went out of her. While you still couldn’t call her radiant she sometimes brought cries of astonishment from onlookers when she suddenly rose, gazelle-like, for a smash across the nets or did a swift double roll, laughing, if she fell. But these spirited and agile manifestations of love were not, it seemed, for Mrs. V.
In point of fact I had something to do with that curious blindness of hers myself. As the weeks of the summer went by and August eventually showered thunder-rain on the surrounding fields of corn I found that the fabulous Mrs. V. angered and attracted me so much that my only defence was to flirt with her.
To have been serious with her could only have been hell; to flirt with her gave sparkle to summer evenings, especially after darkness fell, and she seemed to like it very much.
One evening, after tennis was over, the two of us were sitting in deck chairs at the foot of the terrace; the day had finally faded; the air was still warm but full of the threat of rain and somewhere at the back of the house Tom and Joy were stowing away the tennis net.
Suddenly a light went on in an upstairs window—it might have been Baby Lamb going up to bed—and a long golden shaft fell brightly down to the lawns. For a few seconds before the light went out again the fabulous Mrs. V. sat so fabulously illuminated, all elegantly gold, that as soon as it was dark again I suddenly reached over and kissed her lightly behind the ear, one hand at the same time on her left breast.
‘I don’t know what you intended by that but it was very, very naughty.’
‘Pretend you don’t like it.’
‘It isn’t whether I like it or not. It just isn’t done.’
‘It is done. I’ve done it.’
‘Do you know where your hand is?’
‘I should know. I put it there.’
‘Take it away.’
‘If you insist. Do you insist?’
She showed no sign of insisting but said instead:
‘Do you go round taking liberties of this sort with all married women?’
‘Only the most beautiful ones.’
‘You’re very young to have experience of this sort of thing.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong. It’s experience I’m trying to gain.’
‘You flatter yourself if you think you’re going to gain it here.’
‘I’ve gained it already. I learn very quickly.’
Suddenly for some reason I remembered how much I had hated her that first Sunday. A sudden combined fire of dislike and attraction went bounding through me and I suddenly ran my hand full across her breasts and kissed her full on the mouth. Everything about her at that moment might have belonged to a young girl. Her lips were unresistant and softly moist. She breathed excitedly and her breasts were taut and unrelaxed in my hands.
‘I don’t think you’d better come here any more,’ she said at last, ‘if this sort of thing is to go on.’
‘You like it. Isn’t it what you wanted?’
‘I didn’t say I liked it—’
‘You look so young,’ I said, ‘so marvellously young.’
After I had kissed her again she said:
‘Did experience teach you to say that or merely instinct?’
‘My eyes,’ I said. ‘I don’t need more than my eyes.’
A moment later I was quick to hear footsteps on the terrace and I broke away.
‘Why this sudden rush of discretion?’
‘I think I hear Tom and Joy coming back.’
She laughed.
‘Thank Heaven it’s not you she’s with,’ she said. ‘At least she’s safe with Tom.’
Heavy August rain began to spoil the summer. The lawns grew lush and acid greed. Corn lay beaten to matting in the fields and we played less and less tennis as the month drew on.
I was surprised therefore on a thundery but rainless evening to hear Tom’s car draw up outside our house and to hear Tom say as I went out to him:
‘I’m going over to Vane Court. I thought you’d like to come along.’
‘But there’ll be no tennis, surely.’
‘I know. Hop in all the same. I want to talk to you.’
As I got into the car I noticed a pig-skin suitcase lying on the back seat of the car with Tom’s mackintosh thrown down beside it.
‘What’s the idea of the suitcase?’
I suppose we drove for fully a quarter of a mile before Tom answered the question.
‘I’m going away.’
‘Sudden. You might tell a bloke.’
‘We didn’t arrange it till last night.’
‘We?’
Again he drove for a considerable distance before answering.
‘I’m going away with Joy,’ he said at last. ‘We’re going to be married tomorrow.’
‘Good God.’
It was now my turn to have nothing to say but after another quarter of a mile or so I recovered my senses enough to ask:
‘Does the fabulous Mrs. V. know about all this?’
Tom laughed in a curious tense way in answer to my question and asked me if I thought you’d tell a man if you were going to steal his best silver? I laughed too, at the same time apologising for being a trifle stupid, and said:
‘But where do I come in? What am I supposed to do? Come along and chaperon you?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to keep the fabulous Mrs. V. occupied while I smuggle Joy away somehow. She’ll never be able to do it otherwise. I thought you could put on your flirting act for a while. You’ve been getting plenty of practice lately.’
I struck my knee with the palm of my hand and laughed loudly. This, I said, was rich. Really rich. Doubly rich. With one stroke we could release Joy from that long and awful bondage of hers and at the same time teach the fabulous Mrs. V. a lesson she wouldn’t forget in a month of Sundays. This, I kept repeating, was magnificent. Absolutely magnificent. This would be the sweet, ultimate revenge for that first crucifixional afternoon.
‘Good for you, Tom,’ I said. ‘I’m damned glad. Good for you! It’ll make her terribly happy. Joy, I mean.’
‘It all started with that first ghastly afternoon,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for that. I don’t know which of us suffered most. It was torture.’
‘Good for you, Tom, good for you.’
We drove on and finally Tom stopped the car by a small larch copse about three hundred yards from the house. It wasn’t anything like dark yet but the sky was overcast and you could feel the sultry threat of thunder.
‘Listen. It’s like this,’ Tom said. ‘There’ll only be Joy and Mrs. V. there. It seems her father goes off to play billiards every Wednesday night with Colonel Parkinson. Say you walked over. Then say something like “I saw Tom this morning. He’s working late tonight. He said you said you’d lend him that book by Conrad and I said I’d walk over and fetch it. I’d got nothing else to do.” God, I’m as nervous as hell.’
The elaborate nature of this plot seemed almost childish until Tom said:
‘I know it sounds damned involved and all that. But you see she’s never even allowed to go and post a letter alone. One of the maids always goes with her.’
We parted a few moments later. He promised several times to write. In turn I said again, several times also, how rich it was and how happy I was and I gripped his hand.
At the house it was exactly as Tom had said it would be. Joy and the fabulous Mrs. V. were sitting in the drawing-room: Mrs. V. all band-box in a dress of mauve silk with a deep purple belt and a row of heavy amethysts round her neck, Joy more or less in sackcloth by contrast.
As I went into the drawing-room the sun, in one of those fickle bursts so common with August thunder, suddenly came out and lit up the room. The strange brilliance of the light gave everything, especially the two women, a sudden air of unreality that almost made me nervous too.
‘Well, well, well,’ Mrs. V. said. Richly the amethysts flashed in the sun. ‘What a surprise. Tom with you?’
With what I hoped was a casual air I spoke my piece. The very act of speaking it and at the same time of looking at Joy made me far tenser that I had expected and I was enormously relieved when she said, exactly as if she too had learned it off by heart:
‘Oh! yes, I know the one. Youth. The one he particularly wants to read is Heart of Darkness. I was telling him last Sunday how much I liked it. I’ll run upstairs and get it now.’
She turned with brittle and what seemed to me frightened suddenness and left the room.
Alone with Mrs. V. I said:
‘What marvellous amethysts. They looked like great big violets when the sun shone on them just now.’
‘You’re very poetical tonight.’
‘That’s because I’m in the presence of the right sort of inspiration.’
‘I’m very glad you think so.’
I fingered the amethysts, touching her bare soft neck at the same time. I then stooped to kiss her but she drew away with a sort of solemn coquettishness and said:
‘I don’t think so. I don’t want my daughter to come in and find her mother in an awkward situation, thank you.’
‘Then let’s go where she won’t see us.’
‘And where do you propose that should be?’
I invited her to look at the evening. It was utterly beautiful now. The dark sky had split completely apart in the west. A great virginal sea of blue lay between smouldering orange dunes of cloud and I said:
‘Let’s stroll as far as the lake. I’d like to see the sun set across that water.’
‘All right. I suppose Joy will be hours with the book anyway. She’s always mislaying things.’
‘Oh! probably hours and hours.’
All the way to the lake, across the lush acid lawns, I kept thinking over and over again how rich it was. Marvellously rich. So rich in fact did I find it that I was emotionally very excited and as we sat on the steps of the wooden boat-house on the lake-edge, staring at the sky’s blue and burning reflections in the still water, I suddenly turned and took her fully in my arms and kissed her for a long time.
‘You shouldn’t kiss me like that.’
She was trembling and breathing hard and there was a deep flush in her neck.
‘You’re a very beautiful woman. You know that.’
‘A little flirting is one thing, but—’
‘There’s something about the evening too,’ I said. ‘You can feel a sort of pulse in it. Beating all the time. Can’t you feel it?’
‘Don’t. You make me think things I shouldn’t—’
‘Don’t think. Just feel. Feel it in the air.’
I kept her there for nearly an hour, kissing and fondling her, exciting her and giving her in full measure the kind of flattery she always wanted. The sun went down across the little lake with sulphurous and splendid fire. Even the stalks of the distant reeds were backed with wonderful sparks of light. In the heart of one shadowy embrace a fish jumped from the water with the loud noise of a pulled cork and presently she broke from me and said:
‘We must go back. We absolutely must. Joy will wonder what on earth—Goodness, my hair. And you’ve pulled two buttons off my dress. Goodness what have you done to me?’
‘I hope I’ve paid you back for all the pleasure you’ve given me.’
We walked slowly back across the already dewy lawns in the smouldering half-light. It’s really very rich, Tom, my mind kept saying. Really damn rich. It’s been a pleasure to have been of service, old boy.
When we finally reached the house there were lights in the hall but the drawing-room was still in darkness. We went in and the fabulous Mrs. V. switched on the lights and said:
‘That’s strange. I thought Joy would still be here. It’s very rude of her if she’s gone to bed.’
‘She’s probably really mislaid that book.’
‘I’ll look in her room when I go upstairs. I’ve got to repair some of the damage you’ve inflicted. You’re incorrigible. You’re very naughty—’
‘Good,’ I said.
I suppose it must have been fully a quarter of an hour before I heard her voice in the hall outside, talking to one of the maids, and the maid’s voice saying in reply:
‘No, ma’am, I haven’t seen her. I’ve been in my room for the last hour, turning up the hem of a dress.’
‘It’s very odd. She can’t have gone out. She never goes out in the evenings.’
A few moments later she came into the drawing-room. She had tidied her hair and thrown a light chiffon scarf of petunia pink round her neck so that it discreetly covered the gaps made by the missing buttons.
‘It’s very strange,’ she said. ‘Joy’s nowhere to be seen. She just seems to have vanished. It isn’t like her—’
‘Probably gone out to post a letter.’
‘Oh! she never goes to the post alone.’
I longed to delay and savour the ultimate moment a little longer. It was a moment of great relish to me.
‘She’s probably run away,’ I said.
‘Oh! don’t be preposterous.’
‘It has been known to happen to girls.’
She looked at me quickly, mouth hard. The look wasn’t quite one of suspicion. It was rather restlessly intuitive; and for a moment it threw me off my guard.
‘What made you say that?’
‘Oh! nothing.’
She looked at me again. This time the corners of her mouth flickered in a sudden tremble, rather as they had done when we first met her in the train.
‘You don’t think by any chance she has run away, do you?’
The ultimate moment had come. I seemed to see her once again, laughing at the Sunday crucifixion, and I remembered once again how much I had hated her that day. I remembered too the long weeks of light flirtation. It’s very rich, Tom, I found my mind saying again, very rich.
‘Oh! no, it’s too preposterous. She’d never do a thing like that. She hasn’t the—the—’
‘There’s always the chance that she’s run away with Tom.’
‘Good Heavens, whatever makes you think that?’
This was the great moment of relish. I spoke deliberately.
‘Because,’ I said, ‘that’s exactly what she has done.’
She stood there completely dumb. The vivid shallow eyes merely widened into pained blue gaps.
‘That’s why I took you to the lake. They’re going to be married tomorrow.’
She stood there staring, mute and stricken. She didn’t look very fabulous at that moment and there ran through me the dry echoes of an old emotion. Once again I felt I was the vain, impudent, contemptible cockatoo. I had nothing to say either as she stared at me. I had never before seen anyone broken and dead in spirit. Nor had I even remotely suspected that I should one day match her in vanity and I could only stare mutely in return, watching her nurse, in shattered silence, her own private heart of darkness.
I never understood her then and I doubt very much if I shall ever understand her now.
Only time can tell.