Return I Dare Not Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Margaret Kennedy

  Dedication

  Title Page

  1. A Farewell Performance

  2. The Pleasures of Solitude

  3. Journey to Basingstoke

  4. The Other Life

  5. A Budding Grove

  6. The Yew Parlour

  7. A Very Sad Story

  8. The Lake

  9. Talking to Gibbie

  10. Dinner

  11. Nightstocks

  12. Miss Wilson’s Room

  13. The Good Man

  14. Night and Day

  15. The Wooden Horse

  16. A Quiet Sunday

  17. Beggar My Neighbour

  18. Mrs. Dulcibel Usher

  19. Paradise Lost

  20. The Invader

  21. Our Laura

  22. Waning Star

  23. Hugo’s Heavenly Crown

  24. A Great Fuss About Nothing

  25. Michal

  26. Springs in Deserts Found

  27. Open the Door

  28. I Have No Name

  The History of Vintage

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ‘She is not only a romantic but an anarchist, and she knows the ways of men and women very well indeed’ Anita Brookner

  Hugo Potts is a successful London playwright enjoying his moment of notoriety. Adored by critics and pursued by women, he’s the darling of the literary scene. But his public personae is exactly that – a personae – and he works exhaustedly day and night to portray the person the public expect him to be. One weekend he attends a party at a country house alongside the most important publishers and writers of the time. It’s an opportunity, of course, to meet interesting women. But over the course of the weekend he finds himself scorned by one, and unexpectedly profoundly understood by another, and his values and everything he’s held to be important abruptly come into question.

  About the Author

  Margaret Kennedy was born in 1896. Her first novel, The Ladies of Lyndon, was published in 1923. Her second novel, The Constant Nymph, became an international bestseller. She then met and married a barrister, David Davies, with whom she had three children. She went on to write a further fifteen novels, to much critical acclaim. She was also a playwright, adapting two of her novels – Escape Me Never and The Constant Nymph – into successful productions. Three different film versions of The Constant Nymph were made, and featured stars of the time such as Ivor Novello and Joan Fontaine; Kennedy subsequently worked in the film industry for a number of years. She also wrote a biography of Jane Austen and a work of literary criticism, The Outlaws of Parnassus. Margaret Kennedy died in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, in 1967.

  OTHER NOVELS BY MARGARET KENNEDY

  The Ladies of Lyndon

  The Constant Nymph

  Red Sky at Morning

  The Fool of the Family

  A Long Time Ago

  Together and Apart

  The Midas Touch

  The Feast

  Lucy Carmichael

  Troy Chimneys

  The Oracles

  The Wild Swan

  A Night in Cold Harbour

  The Forgotten Smile

  TO L. P. HARTLEY

  MARGARET KENNEDY

  Return I Dare Not

  1. A Farewell Performance.

  During the last three months of his public life Hugo Pott was obliged to lunch every day at the Acorn Restaurant in Shaftesbury Avenue. He sat always at the same table, in the same draught, and was known to eat little save a mushroom omelette with half a bottle of Johannisberger 21. A change of any kind would have given rise to comment in the Press and might have upset the Management of the Acorn who liked their clients to act consistently in character. The room upstairs, though quieter, had less prestige. So he stayed where he was and continued to eat food which he had long since come to dislike very heartily.

  Most of his companions in the downstairs room were suffering from the same agreeable compulsion. For it is obvious that very well-known people must be somewhat restricted in their choice of eating places. Their patrons like to watch them being fed, and public opinion demands that they shall be herded together at meal times into three, or at most four, recognised places, where any provincial who studies his Gossip Column may know where to look for them. So that Hugo, who was at the summit of his career, who had three plays running simultaneously in London, whose very shoe laces had a news value, could scarcely expect to escape from the bondage of a Favourite Table and a Special Dish. And if anyone had told him, on that last, hot Saturday, of his approaching escape and how soon he would be lunching where and as he pleased, he would probably have felt more dismay than relief.

  For he was still trying to think of the Acorn as a choice, not an imposition, and he still half believed in his own freedom. There were, after all, three other places where one could lunch. But the Acorn was the most convenient. It stood within a stone’s throw of so many theatres. It was handy during rehearsals and if he wanted to pass the time of day with a fellow lion he had merely to cross the room at lunch time. Indeed, the only drawback to the place, so far as he could see, was the difficulty of getting away. He could stroll in as casually as he liked, but to stroll out was a business which required both patience and resource. For the building was fan-shaped and the only door stood at the narrow end. Hugo’s favourite table happened to be at the farthest possible point from this door so that, while making his exit, he was obliged to stop and converse with every one of the lunchers at sixteen tables in between. To smile at them and hurry past would never have done. That might have looked as if all this success was going to his head. He had his reputation for Modesty to keep up.

  This reputation had been acquired by Hugo along with the Table and the Dish. It carried all the hall marks of mass production. He was known to be quite consistently unspoilt and simple. In private life he was a Thoroughly Nice Young Man. He never forgot an old friendship. He never rejected a new one. He was sincerely generous to his rivals and affable without condescension to failures. He managed to be extremely amusing without saying unkind things. Children and animals did not dislike him. Nor had he any vanity; he made no secret of his shortcomings and fell off horses in public with an almost royal regularity. He would have loaded his mother with diamonds if he had had a mother. But he possessed no family beyond a legendary step-aunt, who had brought him up, and for whom he bought yachts, furs and luxury radio sets.

  His public would have been greatly put out if at any time he had failed to do and to be all this, nor did he find the task difficult since he really was, on the whole, a most amiable creature, full of geniality and goodwill. A few enemies he had, but these could offer no possible justification for disliking him save in so far as he was fortunate and they were envious. Honesty and simplicity were natural to him until they became so much the expected thing as to be no longer entirely spontaneous. And if, under the pressure of a world publicity, he gradually ceased to be himself, the reproduction which he was at last obliged to supply resembled the genuine article so closely that even his step-aunt would not have been able to tell the difference.

  The Acorn at lunch time was half full of people who had come up from the country for the day to watch Hugo and the other half behaving in character. As soon as he began to make his preparations for getting away they left off eating and waited to see the performance. Hugo, conscious of his duty, obliged them. As he made his way down the room he was conspicuously popular and modest and unassuming. He laughed at every joke that was made to him, caught and patted every available elbow, raised his eyebrows, sympathised, congratulated, w
as very much astonished, asked advice, gave it, and promised to ring up in the morning. As an exhibition of hard work it was impressive, it took him twenty minutes, but he did not grudge the time or undervalue its importance. Nothing in his life, now, was more important, and he tackled the exertion superbly. The pallor of a deadly fatigue, a subtle hint of despair in his blithe grimaces, set off all this vivacity with just the necessary touch of chill like ice on champagne. Unconsciously his audience felt the flattery of it, the appeal of the mummer who hides a broken heart beneath the motley. He was theirs, body and soul, and they watched him with the affectionate indulgence of possession.

  With one eye on the clock he worked his way towards the door, knowing that a traffic block might now make him miss his train. He was cutting it very fine. But for all that he gave a full two minutes to the crowning grace of his exit. Pausing at the last table of all he murmured a few confidential words to a solitary luncher there, an obscure woman of genius who played elderly bawds in Restoration revivals, and who would never get as far as a Table and Dish of her own. The longest run in her life had been in one of Hugo’s early comedies and he now stopped to give her news of the next one.

  “You’ll come, won’t you?” he exclaimed anxiously. “You will come, won’t you? I do so want you to see it. And you will tell me what you really think, won’t you?”

  The poor old thing left off gobbling her Coupe Jacques and smiled at him. Into her shrewd eyes there stole a warmth of pleasure. She was gratified although she knew perfectly well that he did not care one brass farthing whether she came to the first night of his play or not. Her opinion could be nothing to him and the gallery would not even recognise her. But it was nice of him to say these flattering things, and nice to have him standing there talking as though she was the one person in the Acorn that he wanted to see, while all heads craned round to stare at them. Civility of that sort did not come her way very often. And though a hard life had taught her to be cynical, though she knew that his words meant nothing, that he was playing to an appreciative audience, yet she smiled a response which no synthetic kindness in him could have evoked. She knew it for real kindness inevitably exploited, and this rude strumpeting of natural virtue had long since ceased to shock her. Seeing that he was trying to stifle a convulsive yawn she sympathised, for she knew, possibly better than he did, how few constitutions are built to survive the strain of universal popularity.

  “Run along,” she said drily, “or you’ll miss your train. You’re going into the country, I expect.”

  “A quiet Sunday,” explained Hugo in inverted commas.

  But he did not tell her where because he did not expect that she would be much the wiser. Possibly she had never heard of Syranwood. He had not heard of it himself five years ago, for it had never been extensively written up. Very few of his dear friends in the Acorn would know what an adventure lay before him. For all this triumph, this table and dish summit, was not, as he had so lately thought, the topmost rung of the ladder. There were other, and steeper, heights to be scaled. Some day he might be able to dispense with his publicity agent and take all his meals in private. For a traveller like himself this trip into an undiscovered country must be made with discretion nor could he expect his companions to believe all the stories which he might bring back.

  “A quiet Sunday?”

  He began to fidget with one of Miss Quartermaine’s gloves which lay on the table. It smelt of benzine and he was reminded of his childhood when all white gloves had smelt of benzine. Sundays had been quiet enough then, in all conscience; a day of clean collars which frayed the neck and long, bored hours of being told to behave. He could remember the stupefied hush which fell upon his aunt’s house about three o’clock in the afternoon when the mid-day joint had been eaten. “Now, Hugo, for goodness’ sake sit still. Why don’t you get a nice book and read quietly?” “Can’t I go out and play with Barbara?” “No, you can’t. It’s Sunday.” And then the cracked bell of the chapel at the end of the road would resume its hurried summons and Hugo’s aunt would go to sleep and Hugo would be sent out into the back garden to an afternoon of dreamy idleness among the chickens there. The peculiar noises of Sunday would float one by one into the quietness; a muffin man would tinkle down a distant street, strains from a Salvation Army Band would throw him into a mood of delicious melancholy, and always about tea time the dog next door would begin to bark.

  “Well … not so quiet …” he conceded.

  “I should say not,” said Miss Quartermaine, returning to her lunch. “What’s the matter with your collar? Is it too tight?”

  For Hugo had been so rapt back into the past that he had begun unconsciously to rub his frayed neck. The smell of benzine had, for a few moments, abolished the work of twenty years and restored him to his lost innocence. Nor could he return to the present without a sensation of considerable giddiness, such as may beset any climber who is rash enough to look back. With an effort he forced his mind upwards again, to his goal, to Syranwood, and to the business of pleasing Miss Quartermaine. But where was she going to spend her week-end? Not, he hoped, in London.

  “You’ve said it. I don’t get asked to any stately homes somehow. Oh yes, don’t look so surprised. You didn’t mention where it was, so I guessed it must be something pretty ancestral. But bless you, I wouldn’t have thought you were showing off.”

  “I know. You’re much too nice …”

  “And besides, I don’t read Country Life except at the dentist’s. These Family Seats are all one to me.”

  “It’s not Chatsworth,” said Hugo hastily.

  “What’s that?”

  He was glad that he had not yielded to the temptation of saying that Aggie was coming too. She might have asked what Aggie was, which would have been very awkward. He could not have explained without seeming to show off.

  “I must go!” he said tragically.

  “Yes, do go. And get a good sleep. You look as if you needed it.”

  She smiled at him once more, and remained smiling expectantly after the glass doors had swung behind him, as if waiting to see him return. Everybody in the Acorn had glanced at those swinging doors and he ought to have pushed his pale face in again for a moment to take their applause. But he never came back.

  2. The Pleasures of Solitude.

  The street smelt of sweat, petrol and melted tar. A heat wave had set in and Hugo blinked a little as the glare from the pavement struck up at him. He was dangerously exhausted and on the point of collapse. During the past week he had enjoyed, at the most, about eleven hours of repose, and he had not slept since Wednesday. To his friends it seemed as though he must never sleep at all, for he never went home before seven in the morning and had always written something marvellous by lunch time. But he dozed off occasionally while driving from one place to another and sometimes even in his bed if nobody happened to be about.

  On the opposite pavement, outside the Duchess of York’s Theatre, he could see boards which said ‘House Full.’ The matinée of his play there had begun. When he went in to lunch he had gone past a long string of patient women sitting on campstools in the sun and many of them had recognised him. Now they were all inside. On a Saturday afternoon, in the middle of a heat wave, after a run of five months, he could fill a theatre. That was why he had been asked to Syranwood. That was why he could talk intimately of Aggie. All these things—Aggie, Syranwood, the campstools and the ‘House Full’ boards, were symbols. They were concrete expression of his enormous success.

  For between Aggie and those quiet Sundays beside the chicken run there lay a gulf which only success could span; and down in that gulf he might so easily have spent a life time along with poor old Miss Quartermaine and all the other gifted people who are just not quite successful enough. The very thought of it made him solemn and nervous, for he was too modest to suppose that anything but the most staggering luck could account for it and he could never entirely escape from a fear that there might be, as his aunt would have said, a catch
in it somewhere. The Unseen Gods might notice him one day, as he scurried along the street, and change their minds.

  His car waited just a little way past the theatre, and he screwed up his eyes against the sun as he looked about for it. Bought a month ago, it did not immediately strike the eye as all the others had, but was upholstered in dark blue and slid about through the traffic like a commanding shadow. A second glance at it was indeed impressive. If only he could reach it unmolested he might look forward to the enjoyment of a good yawn in peace and solitude. Before Waterloo he might get a lot of yawning done and in the train he might even snatch a little sleep. It was in this hope that he had decided to go down by train, for if he had gone by road he would have been obliged to offer a lift to Corny Cooke, who was also going to Syranwood. Before breakfast that morning Corny had cadged for one by telephone, asserting that he would be ready to start at any hour and was about to come round to Hugo’s flat. Hugo replied that he would be at the theatre all the morning and would probably go down by train. Corny asked which train. Hugo told him the wrong one. So that the threat of company on the journey had been averted. His geniality tap must be turned off for a little while, since he knew that extravagant demands would be made upon it at Syranwood. He must sleep first, yawn, sigh, not see anybody.

  The door to safety was open before him, and in thirty seconds he would be almost alone. But on the brink he was snatched back. A timid voice hailed him. Turning, he found himself confronted by a very dingy fragment of the past, a dear friend of seven years ago, now left behind in the gulf. For an uncomfortable instant he feared that he was not going to be able to recall her nickname. But before he had finished giving a start of surprise he remembered and brought it out.

  “Joey!” He caught at her elbow eagerly. “My Angel! How are you? How’s Squirrel?”

  “Oh!” said Joey, looking extremely happy. “Oh!”