A World of Love (11 page)

The men, within an inch of being outmanned, rallied. Mamie, having for some time given the impression that she had shot her bolt by that inspirational doing with the rose, sat up and took rather cosmic notice. Lady Latterly leaned across and, with the back of her fingers, delivered a flick or knock at Peregrine’s wrist—negatively seated beside Jane he had scooped up petals and out of them had been composing a hieroglyphic on the lace cloth, for his own silently whistling and slightly frowning attention only. With a start, he acknowledged her taloned hand. The galante revival was signalized by a lifting of glasses, almost as though to drink a toast; and though one by one these were put down again, there remained the sensation that there had been a moment. There ensued a release of ardour and flattery, so that the two women, though set always back from the spotlit Jane, could each queen it over new little subsidiary courts of love. In its own way, talk took a heroic turn—a recollection of action as it could be, a glint of authority through bravery, a look of being back again on the mettle appeared on faces, making them less acquiescent and less opaque; it now was possible, looking round, to distinguish each man from the others by the revivification of some unequivocal quality he and he only had had when young. At the same time, while these men helped to compose Guy, they remained tributary to him and less real to Jane—that is, as embodiments—than was he.

Snapshots taken before Antonia was a photographer fused with the ‘studio portrait’ taken in uniform for Lilia, on the hall wall at Montefort (oak framed, overcast by the flank of the stopped clock, all but secretively to be disregarded) and with what was inadvertently still more photographic in shreds of talk. Over the combination of glance and feature, the suggestion of latitude in the smile, rested a sort of indolent sweet force. Now more than living, this face had acquired a brightened cast of its own from the semi-darkness, from which it looked out with an easy conviction of being recognized. Nothing was qualified or momentary about it, as in the pictures; this was the face of someone here to the full—visible, and visible all at once, were the variations and contradictions, the lights and shades of the arrested torrent of an existence. Invisibly concentrated around him was all the time he had ever breathed: his todays, his yesterdays, his anticipated tomorrows—it could be felt how and understood why something had emanated from him so strongly into the experience of the room when he joined the party. The set of his head was joyous and dictatorial—he was
at
the party, into it, key-placed in the zonal merging manly pattern of black-and-white round this round table. What yet was to be recognized was his voice—so expectant of it that she kept on all but detecting it, just not here or there, just not now or then but at the same time everywhere and always, in extraneous overrising or underlying notes, tones, syllables, modulations in the now crowded vociferous general talk, Jane sat listening for it and to no other. She could not but know it when once she heard it, could not but hear since it was to be heard, it could not but be to be heard since it would not be like him not to be talking. What remained beyond her was what he said—she had not the wits, at the moment, to take it in, even if it were to be sorted out. Her absorption—as from time to time, without raising her eyes, she recollected a glass and again drank from it or, putting out what seemed no longer to be exactly her own hand, played with a petal between her plate and Peregrine’s—was solely in her sense of his being
here.
Here he is, because this is where I am. He had come to join her—join her, and on the strength of one invocation of his name! Before speaking it, had not the breath she drew been big with risk and exhilaration? The sound had gone out on to knowing air: had not the moment suffered as, with a shock, it took the charge of immanence and fatality?… And now? She must hope never in all her life again to be so aware of him, or indeed of anyone—for this was becoming so much too much for Jane, so giddying, as to be within an iota of being nothing. The annihilation-point of sensation came into view, as something she was beginning to long to reach.

She began to wonder how it would be
to
look straight across the table. For, what continued to tell her that he was there dinned in the knowing of why and how. Dominator of the margin of the vision, he was all the time the creature of extra sense. The face depended for being there upon there being no instant when it was looked straight at.

So, the resemblances to Antonia became more haunting because they could not be scrutinized. It was as though he, to speed up the coming back, carelessly had annexed from the cousin he counted sister some traits of hers, and was at once making use of them and subduing them. Or it could be that Antonia, left alone, had consoled or rebuilt herself by copying Guy, and that one now was in the presence of the original? The resemblance, nothing to do with feature, had come out in none of the photographs of Guy: it was an affair of mobility, of living-ness—something to do, perhaps, with an interlock between the cousins’ two ways of being, apart, yet one the cause of the other. Neither could be in abeyance while the other lived: he now tonight recalled Antonia, as she must often (had one known what was happening) have recalled him. His tenancy of her perhaps accounted for the restless mannishness in the woman she was—and yet, no: for all her accesses of womanishness one could make a guess at the man she would have been, and it would have been a different man, not Guy. This was a question of close alikeness (with everything psychic, emotional, perhaps fatal which such alikeness could comprehend) not, for an instant, of identity. That the likeness should be a matter of look not looks, that it less declared than betrayed itself, like a secret history, made a deep-down factor of it—not least for Jane. The effect on her was to create a fresh significance for Antonia.

Torment caused the girl to look straight across.

He was gone. To mark this, at the same moment Terence, swaying sideways to give force to an argument, leaned a hand on the back of the empty chair. It was to be noted—and Jane did note, for she stared hard at it—how characteristic the old fellow’s turned-up thumb was. Below it was gleaming, to her relief, the unhidden Chinese-chippendale pattern of the mahogany. She was free to entertain joy as not before: indeed she
saw
Guy now that she saw him gone. Not a’vestige stayed on the outer air; she could therefore enter the full of seeing and knowing. That he had been with them, with her, was an unfettered fact—where is there perfection but in the memory?

The candles were burning some way down. How late was it? With lassitude a clock once again struck.

‘
I
don’t say so,’ Mamie was saying, ‘Priscilla says so.’

‘Then heaven help her,’ Terence was saying, ‘the woman’s 
wrong. The horse was looking at me last Friday.’

‘Oh well, it will be all the same a hundred years hence, I daresay.’

‘Now there you’re wrong: you won’t find a horse left.’

Mamie yawned: ‘What dreadful things to say.’ She stretched out, reclaimed the rose and tucked it into the tight top of her dress.

‘Mamie won’t even be there to find no horses,’ said Peregrine, rousing himself suddenly. ‘You might just be there,’ he added, turning to Jane, ‘but shrivelled up like a monkey, with black teeth. So why don’t you make hay while the sun shines?’

She replied: ‘I was making hay this morning.’

‘Ah, then that
is
a hayseed in your hair.—May I?’ Peregrine picked it out. ‘How literal of you,’ he said sadly, placing the seed on the cloth for Jane to study.

‘Hello,’ said Lady Latterly, ‘what have you both got there?—What is it
now
? she snapped at the butler, who had come in and was waiting by her chair.

‘If you please, m’lady, the young lady’s cousin has come for her.’

‘Why, when? Who’s the young lady’s cousin?’

‘She gave no name.’

‘Well then, bring her in then, for heaven’s sake!’

‘She’d prefer, she said, to stop at the door.’

‘How very, very peculiar,’ said Lady Latterly.

Antonia backed the Ford clear of the other cars, snatched her gear out again from reverse and tore rocketing off round the gravel sweep. Jane, looking back at the castle, to which lighted windows and butler still on the steps gave a farewell theatricality, observed:

‘We seem to be going away with an awful noise.’

‘And how had you been thinking of getting home?’

‘No one was going away yet.’

‘Have you any idea what time it is?’

‘No,’ said the girl indifferently. ‘Why, have you?’ Their headlights ran extra-sharply over the rhododendrons lining the avenue—a rabbit shot out, swirled in the glare and vanished under the wheels. Antonia, swerving too late, swore. Jane, pursuing what seemed the line of thought, went on: ‘You mean, you were late at the sea?’

‘Not at all,’ said Antonia sea-coldly.

‘Then if it isn’t late, why did you come for me so early? What made you come for me at all?’

‘I thought it likely you’d be what indeed you are.’

‘What indeed am I?’

‘Drunk, you little bore.’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Jane in an even tone. ‘One can be other things than that.’ Reflectively she waited to let the car turn out of the castellated gateway, then said: ‘I don’t a bit feel like you sometimes seem.’

‘That is no guide at all, I assure you.’

‘I simply feel I’m more than just simply me.’

‘You’ll soon get to recognize
that
sensation. All the same,’ stormed Antonia, ‘what a way to start! What a seedy outing! And you were seduced also, I daresay?’

‘Oh no; we sat in the drawing-room, then in the dining-room. Everyone she’d invited was quite old.’

‘What do you mean, “everyone she’d invited”?—Anyone crash the party?’

The girl was silent.

Antonia repeated: ‘A seedy outing!’

Jane said mildly: ‘It was an evening out.’

‘Rats: it was a getaway.’ Antonia jerked the car to a stop, for the aggressive purpose of lighting the cigarette she was in no mood to let Jane light for her—she did indeed, by the at once alcoholic and slighting over-precision of her own movements, imply she considered Jane in no state to do so. The burning match cast out through the wound-down window was on its way followed by Jane’s eyes—so, realized the girl, smelling bracken charring where it had fallen, so long as there’s fuel there’s no extinction! Engine running, the Ford was pulled up half in the ditch and canting towards the hedge, whose secretive night-scents whispered to the senses with their ‘again’. Jane, folding cooled arms across her breast to hug in her heart, confided:
‘This
was the road, last night.’

Antonia with irony said: ‘Extraordinary.’ ‘Which is why I wish you’d leave me alone.’

‘I can hardly wait to. Walk home, by all means!’

‘Don’t be furious,’ pleaded the girl. ‘I am so happy.’

‘I can’t help that.’

‘Is that why you are furious?’

Antonia turned in the driver’s seat to accord Jane a brief, contemptuous stare, intensified by the dark between them.

‘I forget,’ she said, ‘how ordinary you are. For that, I should blame nobody but myself.’

‘Not me, then, for going to the castle?’

‘What, for running to where you’re whistled for, nipping off the moment my back was turned? I could hardly be madder with you, I’m bound to say.’

‘But you were furious before that. After all, you went to the sea without me.’

‘The sea without you is sometimes nice.’ Antonia stamped her foot down and they moved on again, as though something had been established, which it had not. Jane’s ecstatic willingness to be silent became as insistent as though the girl were singing—suspicion that inwardly she was, and a tormented refusal to know why, preyed on Antonia as the night jolted past them. The swerving course of the Ford made honeysuckle, a boot caught on the hedge, the cadaverous chimney-end of a vanished cottage, a hallucinated wandering white horse lurch out, from one side then the other, into glaring view: their way seemed to be posted along with warnings, in spite of which Antonia spoke and said: ‘This road I knew before you were born.’

‘Oh. Was there always that white horse?’

‘Why?’

‘Only, I think we drove right through it.’

‘Who was there, tonight?’ Antonia suddenly asked, matching a change of gear with a change of tone.

Jane glanced the driver’s way. ‘There was old Terence.’

‘Not Terence Foxe—still going?’

‘Yes, in a way. I forgot to ask him if he remembered you.’

‘Why should you ask him if he remembered me?’

‘Because I asked him if he remembered Guy.’

‘You don’t ask me if I remember Guy.’

‘Ask you—why should I? How could you not?’

‘Me? I not only
could
not, it’s a question whether I ever do.

You, Jane, can’t conceive what memory is. You can’t conceive what memory costs. Remember? Who could afford to?’

‘Mother affords to.’

‘Yes, and easily too. The long and short of it, you’re your mother’s daughter.’

‘Antonia
—
was
he in love with her?’