Return I Dare Not Read online

  5. A Budding Grove.

  “I think you’re so right,” said Hugo to Aggie. “Don’t you, Usher?”

  “Don’t I what?” asked Ford, starting out of his wooden trance.

  “Don’t you think Syranwood’s terribly unnatural?”

  Ford shook his head and asked what they meant.

  Hugo and Aggie did not know. Indeed Aggie had merely, in the first place, repeated a remark of Adrian’s. So Ford was obliged to help them along. He said:

  “I suppose you mean it’s been got up to look like a picture.”

  “Did Otho Rivaz build it?” asked Hugo.

  “Oh no. He only bought it when he married Geraldine. But he did something to it. He had terribly good taste.”

  Hugo instantly said that people with terribly good taste always gave him a superiority complex. He was feeling happier again. He chattered gaily as the car turned out of the road into a short beech avenue. But just as they rounded the corner of the house he realised that he was going to yawn again. Laura and Lady Geraldine were coming across the lawn; whatever he did he must not start by gaping in their faces. With an immense effort he controlled the muscles of his throat and jerked his features back into a grin. Aggie got out. Ford got out. Between the ladies there was a ritual of embraces and murmured endearments:

  “Aggie darling … how delicious this is …”

  He might just get time to yawn and have done with it. Somebody had told him that stretching the neck upwards is a very good thing, like a chicken drinking. Taking a few steps away along the drive he stretched it and his eyes, thus lifted, encountered two other pairs of eyes just above his head. Two young girls were watching his arrival from an upper window. They hovered over the queer antics of their elders like a couple of severe young angels leaning over the bar of heaven, interested but unsympathetic. For a moment he thought that they had been waiting for him to smile at them and he did so, very charmingly, waving his hand and hoping that the poor children would not wave back so violently as to fall out of the window. But their smooth faces did not melt into any extreme ravishment of gratitude. A faint, polite spasm passed over each, as though some ghostly governess had bidden them smile at Mr. Pott. Towards waving there was no gesture.

  Yet they ought to have been pleased. He recognised one of them. It was Marianne, a granddaughter of the house. He even remembered her name and called it out, pronouncing it in the correct English way “Mary Ann.” For they had made friends four years ago, when he had been so shy and ill at ease, and she had taken him for a swim in the lake. A taciturn but strenuous child she had been, and she nearly drowned him, but he had liked her and her solid, old-fashioned name. Surely a creature so young and negligible (for she could not be more than nineteen even now) must like to have its name remembered and called out by Hugo Pott!

  Slightly crestfallen he turned his smile upon a more deserving object and as he strolled away with Lady Geraldine across the lawn he asked, with a laugh, whether Marianne could still stand on her head at the bottom of the lake longer than anyone else.

  “He’s saying something about us,” said Solange, the other chit. “I wonder what it is.”

  Marianne said sourly:

  “I expect he’s saying that we look like twin cherries on a pillow.”

  “Like what?”

  “Our faces are too pink, Solange. But he thinks we’re fine girls and a credit to our parents.”

  “Well, my parent will need all the credit he can get.”

  Whereat they both laughed, because the parent in question was Sir Adrian Upward. Solange was the eldest of his callow brood, but he did not yet know that she was installed at Syranwood and they hoped to give him quite a little surprise. It was time that something of the sort should be done, for Solange was getting desperate.

  “But you know,” said Marianne thoughtfully, “even if he does climb down, I don’t see that it will do you much good. You don’t want to go about with him, do you? You wouldn’t like it. You’d be bored. You can’t think how boring they all are. Of course I don’t mean your father: I know he’s very clever, and all that. But the rest of the people here this week-end, the Greys and Aggie, and Corny …”

  “And Hugo Pott!”

  “And Hugo Pott. You don’t want to live in their pockets, do you?”

  Solange shook her head. She did not want to go about with her father or to make her way in the world on the strength of being anybody’s daughter.

  “But I want him to know I’m there,” she explained. “If he doesn’t want me to turn up at houses where he’s staying, he’s got to buy me off. It’s no use talking to him at home because he’s never there long enough. If we ask him for anything he just looks absent-minded and says he’ll be out for dinner. Aunt Betsy’s tried. We’ve all tried, but we can’t get him to grasp the idea that I must be sent to Germany. I’ve got to get at him from the outside. After this week-end, if I manage well, I should think he’ll be more than ready to send me to Germany.”

  “But supposing he really hasn’t got the money?”

  “He can sell some of his first editions, and original manuscripts. I’ll pay him back when I’m earning.”

  So they had planned this visit to Syranwood and Marianne promised to help in the matter of clothes, for Solange had no evening dress at all save a piece of black net partially ornamented with sequins which Betsy had bought at a sale before the war.

  “You can come by an early train and choose some of my clothes,” she said. “I’m so much larger than you that it will be quite easy. Packer will cut out pieces till they fit you.”

  “But then they won’t fit you any more.”

  “All the better. Grandmamma will say how I’ve grown and get me new ones.”

  Early in the day they made their selection and the morning was spent in hasty dressmaking with help from Marianne’s maid. But they were neither of them vastly interested in clothes, and as soon as they could they took themselves off to a room still known at Syranwood as Miss Wilson’s room, after some prehistoric governess whom everybody had forgotten. Miss Wilson’s room had a piano in it and Solange had brought with her some new music, a Stabat Mater of Orlando di Lasso. They had what they called a good go at it until the sound of cars in the drive told them that the house party was arriving. Solange was anxious to see what her father looked like when away from his family, so they peeped out of the window, keeping well behind the curtains.

  “He’s cross about something,” she commented in surprise. “He can’t know already …”

  Marianne looked out and said:

  “They generally arrive looking cross. I expect he wanted to go in the other car. Who is in the other car I wonder.”

  As soon as Adrian had been carried out of sight they leant right out of the window and scanned the drive for the next car. Solange was greatly excited at hearing that she was about to see Ford Usher, for she knew all about culex pseudopictus, though toxicology and not entomology was her especial passion. She knew that Ford had made his discovery on an Island in the Caspian Sea called Yeshenku. And as they hung out of their window, waiting for him to come, she told Marianne all about it. Their two heads drew close together in girlish excitement as Solange prattled of sporonts, schizonts, merocytes, merozoits, gametes, zygotes, and a-sexual cycles. But Ford, when he turned up, was a disappointment. He allowed himself to be led off by Laura just as though he had been quite an ordinary man.

  “I’ll never make a hero of anyone again,” said Solange bitterly. “Let’s have another go at Quando Corpus, before we go down to bathe.”

  She went and balanced herself on the rickety piano stool and picked out the first notes of a lead which she always took wrong, humming:

  Quando corpus morietur

  Fac ut animae donetur …

  But Marianne remained at the window to watch Hugo being taken across the lawn to the tea table under the cedar tree. To her mind it was a disagreeable sight, but she forced herself to watch it because she wanted to catalogue, to
impress upon herself, every single thing that could be said against him. She found many, and she finished by a murmured comment which was audible to Solange.

  “Anyhow it would be awful to marry a person called Pott.”

  She was thinking aloud, and did not expect a reply. But Solange whirled round on the piano stool.

  “A man called what?”

  “Pott,” said Marianne in a faint voice.

  “But who wants to marry a man called Pott?”

  “Nobody, I should think.”

  “It would be just as awful to marry him if his name was Macquorquordale, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Marianne. “I expect so. You still don’t get that lead right.”

  “And what did you mean by saying ‘anyhow’? You do think he’s dreadful, don’t you? You do think he’s a King Toad? What? Speak up! Don’t mumble.”

  Marianne spoke up and said:

  “Not really.”

  “Not really? How do you mean?”

  “Most people like him frightfully.”

  “Nobody under fifty, I’m sure. And you don’t. You can’t.”

  Marianne shook her head sadly.

  “No,” she agreed. “I don’t like him, very much, now. But …”

  Solange could not help it. She began to hum:

  “I do not like this fellow much,

  But I love him quite a lot.”

  Not that she meant anything in particular, except to tease Marianne for using so suggestive a phrase. So that when she saw her young friend’s face she stopped, embarrassed.

  “What?” she said incredulously.

  Marianne nodded, whereat she threw up her hands and fell off the music stool. Finding the floor quite a comfortable place she continued to lie there and stare up reprovingly at her blushing friend.

  “How very indelicate,” she began after a pause.

  It was. For they had often agreed that it was a breach of taste to mention such things. If one was in love one should not talk about it. To Aggie and Laura and matrons of their kidney such confidences were permissible, since they had nothing else to discuss. But by people who knew a merocyte from a merozoit it was not done.

  “You began it,” pointed out Marianne.

  “I didn’t mean to. But my dear, since we’ve begun being so vulgar, do tell me just a little more. I can’t understand it. How … how long has this been going on?”

  “Four years. He came here to lunch once. Somebody brought him. He was so nice. And so …”

  “So good-looking. I quite understand. Nobody denies that.”

  Marianne hesitated. Since she had begun to tell the truth she might as well go on.

  “Not so very,” she confessed. “He wasn’t nearly so good-looking then as he is now. He used to have … spots … rather. He never has them now. I suppose he’s outgrown them or something.”

  “I wish I could,” said Solange with a sigh. “I’m just starting one on the bridge of my nose and I shall look a sight by Monday.”

  “Have you tried dry boracic powder?”

  “Of course I have. Go on. He came here four years ago and he was spotty but nice … How was he nice?”

  “Well, you see, he is nice.”

  “Never! Not now, anyhow.”

  “I don’t know. I think he was born a nice person. And people stay what they’re born, don’t they? Of course he wasn’t so famous then, and he had a good look to see what forks everybody else was using, and fell about a good deal on the hall floor where it’s polished. And Grandmamma would keep talking to him about South Africa because she thought he was a Rhodes Scholar. But after lunch we went swimming, and I asked if he was any good standing on his head at the bottom of the water. And he challenged me. And we dived down and stood on our heads. And we stood and stood till I thought I was going to burst. I had to come up or I’d have drowned. And when I looked round for him he wasn’t there. He was still under. Oh dear, I was frightened.”

  “You don’t mean to say that he can stay under longer than you?”

  “Umhum.”

  “Well, that is amazing.”

  Solange was impressed in spite of herself. But all this was four years ago. It did not alter the fact that Hugo was nice no longer. She got up and went to the window for another survey.

  “Just look at him now! Just come here and look. He’s being ever so boyish and charming over the strawberries.”

  “I know.”

  “He lets himself be photographed in bed.”

  “I know.”

  “He’s a King Toad in fact.”

  “Well … perhaps …”

  “So that you can’t …”

  “That’s just it, Solange. I do.”

  Marianne turned away from the window with a face of deep distress, adding:

  “I do. And I’m sure I wish I didn’t. Because it’s all true … all that you say. And when I heard he was coming here I thought I shouldn’t mind. I thought he would just be so different that I shouldn’t mind, any more than if he’d died and somebody else with the same name came to stay. But I do mind. When he looked up and waved at us just now, I realised that I mind most frightfully. He’s still too like … too like what he was. I couldn’t feel that there was any difference, though of course I know that there is. I mean I can see him as you see him, and it’s dreadful, because at the same time I feel that’s quite wrong. And I shall have to change into quite another person myself before I shall leave off minding.”

  Solange was silent and uncomfortable. She had not bargained for a confession like this and she wished that she had not forced it out of Marianne. Their pleasant, light-hearted alliance was not built to survive such a plunge into seriousness. There was no real intimacy between them, though they had many tastes in common, and they could only remain friends so long as they continued to skim delightfully and flippantly over the surface of things. She did not wish to be unsympathetic, but she could think of nothing to say, and, relapsing from the mature idiom which she had lately striven to adopt, she could only murmur:

  “Golly!”

  Marianne laughed, for she did not easily take offence, and it was funny to see Solange taking refuge, mentally, behind the hockey stick and the games tunic.

  “Let’s try Quando Corpus again,” she said.

  They went back to the piano and as Solange climbed on to the stool again she began to mumble an apology.

  “That’s all right,” said Marianne hurriedly. “I oughtn’t to have said anything about it. It was a mistake.”

  6. The Yew Parlour.

  Their clear, unimpassioned voices rose once more and floated out into the hot silence of the summer afternoon. Under the cedar tree the tea drinkers paused to listen.

  “The girls,” explained Lady Geraldine. “They’re practising again, poor things.”

  “Which girls?” asked Philomena. “I thought you only had Marianne here.”

  “Yes, but she has a friend.” Lady Geraldine paused and then smiled benevolently at Corny. “Your daughter,” she said.

  She was pleased with herself for managing to remember the relationship. Absence of mind, always her worst failing, had grown upon her terribly since Otho’s death, and she was put to many shifts by her failing memory. For instance, she was obliged to call the under-gardener Jex, in order to distinguish him from the head gardener who was called Blake, but his name was really Simmonds. Laura used to get very angry with her.

  But, though absent-minded, she was not devoid of social sensibility, and the silence which followed her announcement told her that something was amiss with it. Corny had choked over his strawberries and the rest looked like people who have gone down in a lift rather suddenly. She glanced from one to another and realised that she had made a mistake. Of course Corny had no children: he had not been married more than eighteen months. But surely they had told her that this nice little girl, Marianne’s friend, was somebody’s daughter. Solange! Solange …

  Helplessly she looked round for her daughter to
set her right. But Laura had gone off with that man of hers—what was his name? Mr. Poe, who discovered Mosquitoes. Not that she had got the name quite right, but she knew that it reminded her, for some reason, of Edgar Allan Poe, and that she must manage to keep from muddling him up with the other young man who wrote plays. And it was very stupid of her not to be sure of the name because this Poe person had been on the carpet before, and she could never be quite certain how far things had gone between him and Laura that time when the silly girl ran off to earn her living as a Lady Help in Hampstead. Not that very much could have happened in so short a time, for Mr. Poe’s mother had behaved very badly and turned poor Laura out of her house after three weeks. But for several months Laura had looked pallid and intense, as though she might be pining for somebody and she had eventually accepted Alec with the air of a nun taking the veil. Still she had left off wanting to support herself and seemed to grow more reasonable as the years went on, so that it was a thousand pities that she should have met the young man again and be stravaguing off with him when she ought to have been helping at the tea table and supplying a proper surname for Solange.

  “Quite wrong,” she told them all. “I was quite wrong. Not Corny’s daughter. Of course not. Somebody else’s daughter. Laura will remember.”

  Corny was the first to recover countenance and help the others out. He said that nowadays he found young girls very frightening and difficult to get on with.