A Man of Forty (10 page)

“What's happened?” Adam asked. “ I'm quite in the dark.”

Walking buoyantly at his side, with occasional long-ranging glances at the green open country through which he was being led, Adam listened to David's story with a suitable display of attention, astonishment, and concern. His interest was unfeigned; but the concern he
showed was no more than a concession to good manners. With the satirical eye of a man who has sentiment to spend only on himself he saw David's situation in a merely ridiculous aspect : the middle-aged man, many years married, losing his head over a young girl. The disparity in age between David and the young woman roused a certain malice in Adam : he was almost prepared to be indignant that a man of David's years should presume to think himself a match for such youth. If it wasn't conceit, a thing not even Adam could plausibly attribute to David, it was something even more irritating, tee blindness of sheer innocence. Yet David wasn't—was he?—a simpleton exactly. He must, by now, know a thing or two—though not, apparently, where he got off. Such ignorance was a kind of bliss, and Adam was a little inclined to grudge him it : the more so because David made no comment on the surprising part of the story, which was that he, old David, had somehow captured the fancy of a girl twenty years his junior. David said very little about Mary at all. “ She… er… reciprocates “ was the way he put it, and hurried past the point, careful to display no feeling. It seemed to Adam that he took his good fortune rather coolly.

There wasn't a lot that Adam could say.

“Of course, it's a big step to take, old man. You haven't been long making up your mind, have you?”

“Long enough,” said David. “ Anyhow, it's made up now.”

David spoke almost curtly, in dread of having his own secret misgivings reinforced by arguments from Adam. He dared not admit to himself how shaken he was, and how shaken his resolution, by the change in Lydia, a change of which he (so he accused himself) was the author, and a change indefinably different from anything he could have predicted in her.

“What about money?” Adam asked. “ Isn't that a difficulty?”

“I've gone into all that,” said David. “ Lydia has some means of her own, as you know. A little. I don't say money will be too plentiful for me and ... for Mary. But there it is. If we think it's worth it . .

Love's young dream, thought Adam; and nearly said it. But instead he remarked jauntily : “ Well, well, well! These things will happen. Look, David!—what would you do in a case like this? There's a wench of my acquaintance…” He was on his own ground
again, and happy, or nearly so. He didn't exactly want David's advice, but he did want to talk his problem out. He outlined the situation in crisp terms, and with an almost contemptuous detachment, this being the only alternative to suffering a loss in self-esteem. “ All very fine. But suppose she starts having babies on me?”

“That danger can be guarded against,” said David.

“But not eliminated,” retorted Adam. “ We've had one narrow squeak already. Or so she says.” The qualification represented a new idea to Adam : what if she'd been bluffing, and had then thought better of it?

“I should have thought it was rather late in the day to
begin
thinking about that,” David said.

He had told Adam his momentous news, and Adam had retorted with a story of carnal high jinks, the implication being that the cases were parallel. But David's manner, carefully neutral, gave no hint of the fact that he was offended. Offended—and astonished by the young man's obtuseness. That, said David, is what they call being realistic. The new cant.

“I wonder why it's thought scientific nowadays,” said David, “ always to explain the higher in terms of the lower.”

“Apropos of what?” Adam asked. Irrelevant remark, he thought, and a bit pompous.

“Apropos of nothing in particular… Hullo, there's somebody I know.”

In view of the conversation that had just passed between them, the form of this remark was disingenuous. Dr. Hinksey and his granddaughter came riding over the green hills, across which, on a hedgetess track, David and Adam were walking. Mary riding a horse was a new revelation to David : the gallant beauty of the sight took his breath away. She approached, beautifully unconscious of him. Then she saw him, recognized him, and the still perfection of her face flowered into sudden happiness. She laughed, a child's laugh; and the day, the scene, the chance encounter, became suddenly the most delicious joke in the world.

Shyness followed, veiled in the quietness that was her normal manner.

“Hullo, David!”

“Hullo, Mary!”

There was no more to be said, in words. For a fraction of a second their eyes met : surprised, entranced, hardly believing in their luck. And David lumberingly remembered that he was not alone.

“Oh, you don't know each other, do you? This is Adam Swinford. Miss Wilton. He's staying the week-end with us.”

And now old Hinksey joined them : spare, ruddy-faced, wiry, with nothing old about him except the genial rays round his eyes, and (as David had said once) nothing grey except his beard. It was a beard cut after an ancient mode, divided into two parts, a smooth red chin (like a small apple) being visible at the fork. He reined in his horse and said impetuously, interrupting whatever conversations were in progress : “ You're just the man I want, Brome. What's the earliest thing you can remember? The very earliest.”

The party at once grouped themselves round this question, though another began to occupy Adam : what did a girl like this imagine she saw in David? For the situation was crystal clear to Adam. David tells him of a girl; a girl suddenly appears; it all fell very pat, but he nevertheless could not doubt that this was the divinity in question. And she was, he couldn't help seeing, rather more than good-looking. Who would have thought it of old David? She was in fact something quite superlative, if you liked the quiet kind, the still, the sphinx-like. And the quiet kind were often the best value, having surprising things in reserve. Adam was slightly piqued that this particular specimen, this Mary Wilton, seemed scarcely aware of him; she, too, had turned to consider her grandfather and the question he had put to David. David himself, smiling partly from shyness, partly from amused appreciation of Hinksey's directness, stared at the turf and considered the matter. It was so like Gaffer (as Mary called him) to plunge into the middle of things without wasting time on preliminary small talk.

“
One
of the earliest things I remember,” said David, after a pause, “ is something that may or may not have happened. I can never be sure I didn't imagine it ...”

And who cares? said Adam, covertly glancing at Mary's astonishing profile. He could not be bothered to listen to these reminiscences of infancy. The pet indulgence of the middle-aged, he said, recalling that only last week, in the course of his day's work, he had concocted a sleek paragraph to the effect that if you would
recover the Bright Eye and Clear Skin of Childhood you had only to fill in the coupon and send threepence in stamps for a free sample of his firm's product, taking care to print your name and address in block letters. He was impatient of this talk and tried to detect a similar impatience in Mary's proud, aloof, yet gentle look. He wished now, since nothing had come of it, David being so full of his own troubles, that he hadn't mentioned Lily Elver, of whom at this moment he could think only with indignation—indignation that he, Adam, should ever have put up with anything so absurdly remote from his taste.

Going round picture galleries was a funny way of spending Sunday afternoon, thought Lily, and there was no denying that it tired a person. All the same she could honestly say she had enjoyed it, or at any rate some of it, and, sinking into one of Miss Camshaw's soft armchairs, she did say so, several times over.

“Of course I don't understand it like you do, Edith,” she hastened to declare.

The disclaimer jarred on Miss Camshaw a little : she couldn't avoid noticing a tinge of self-assertion in it. But lapses like that, she reflected, were part of the girl's simplicity, and much more could have been forgiven to anyone so fresh, so sweet, so dazzlingly young as Lily. And much more, she suspected, might have to be forgiven, if the two and two she had put together had the meaning she ascribed to them.

“You mean the pictures, darling?” she said gently. Well, I've had twenty-five years more to look at them in, haven't I? It's not a question of understanding, in the narrower sense. It's a question of how to let knowledge increase the range and depth of one's enjoyment.” Lightly, with caressing fingers, she touched the girl's bare arm. “ There! Quite a lecture for you! Now we'll have some tea.”

“Can I help?” said Lily, knowing the answer.

Lily was never allowed to help in the preparation of meals : not merely because she was the guest, but because, as Lily herself
couldn't help observing, it gave Edith special pleasure to wait on her. In some ways Edith was “ funny,” in Lily's elastic sense of the word. She sometimes gave Lily the impression of having more emotion than she knew what to do with. Lily put it all down to that hypothetical married man who had won her heart twenty years ago, or whenever it was; but she complicated her theory by trying to work the photograph into it, the photograph over the mantelpiece which Edith said was of her brother in India who had died when she was a child. That photograph, and one of a scene from an amateur production of
Hamlet
in which Edith had surprisingly taken the chief part, were the only pictures in the room, except for a pair of Japanese prints that didn't look like anything : which was “ funny,” considering whose room it was. Lily lay back in her chair and closed her eyes for a minute, liking to feel the tiredness running out of her limbs, and to hear the tinkle of crockery from the next room. Idly she reviewed her afternoon. Edith was a good sort, in spite of her tendency to get a bit gushy now and again. And some of the pictures had been quite nice. Some nice, and some funny, and some you didn't hardly know how to take. Ever so naked some of them were. Lily liked the cosy ones best, the ones that made you feel you'd like to go there, pat that horse, walk in that field, listen to that old man talking, and so on. She had said as much to Edith Camshaw, and Edith had laughed : but with pleasure, and not
at
her. One of the nice things about Edith was that she didn't make you feel small, like some people did. Adam for instance, when he thought he would : just a word, just a smile, and you felt no more than
so
high. And Edith, unlike Adam again, frequently told Lily how pretty she was.

Thoughts like these drifted in and out of Lily's mind as she sat waiting for Edith to bring the tea tray in. But the trouble about relaxing like this was that it gave the old worry a chance. When you were on the go you forgot your troubles, but once you stopped to think, they were at you again. It was the same at night, only worse : just as you were dropping off, up it popped again, the same old scare, just like someone speaking to you. To silence that voice, that clear cold passionless voice speaking in her inward ear, Lily opened her eyes and looked about the room, seeking distraction. Edith's flat was somehow different today, but only because it was
Sunday, Lily supposed. That meant that the change was in herself, not in the rom : for Sunday, though nowadays a holiday eagerly looked for, had never quite lost the uncomfortable godliness it had had for her when she was a little girl. As she glanced from one austere wall to the other, and at the oppressively “ good” furniture (good in this joyless Sunday sense, she felt) Lily found herself thinking that Edith Camshaw only needed a little alteration to become the perfect friend. But, no getting away from it, she was a terrible old diehard about boy-friends and that; sometimes made you feel quite uncomfortable, and sort of soiled, by the way she took the most harmless remarks. Specially jokes : you didn't half have to be careful. On the other hand she was ever so kind, and what was the use of having a friend if you couldn't tell each other your troubles and things? Lily's heart began beating faster as the idea of confiding in Edith Camshaw took shape in her mind.

“Have I been a long time, darling?” said Miss Camshaw. “ The kettle wouldn't boil.”

“I
am
lazy,” said Lily. “ Just look at me—sitting here like this and letting you do all the work.”

“We'll let it stand a minute or two,” said Miss Camshaw, replacing the lid of the teapot and putting the spoon back into its saucer. “ And while we're waiting I've something to show you.”

She went into her bedroom, which opened out of this sitting-room, and came back presently, carrying in one hand, half hidden behind her back, some kind of heavy ornament : Lily couldn't at once see what it was. Smiling with her secret pleasure, if pleasure it was, and looking round in search of a suitable standing-place for the piece, Miss Camshaw chose finally the bare top of a tall revolving bookcase.

“There,” she said. “ What do you think of her?”

Lily looked at the bronze, and Miss Camshaw looked at her. It was the figure, a trifle over a foot high, of a nude girl, one hand shielding her eyes, the other having just completed the act of un-draping. When Lily saw it for the first time it had given her a slight shock. It gave her a greater shock now, though she was not seeing it for the first time.

“Well?” said Miss Camshaw, waiting for her verdict.

Lily said, lowering her eyes : “ I do like it, in a way. It's ever
so… well, I mean, sort of funny, isn't it? Is it… valuable?”

“No,” said Miss Camshaw. “ It's not the real thing. It's not even a copy. It's Phryne, of course; you knew that.”

The remark was unlike Edith : she had always considerately refrained from assuming that Lily was as well informed as herself. But the question seemed to admit of only one answer, and Lily gave it.