This Was Tomorrow (18 page)

“A little more of that wouldn’t do any harm these days,” said Lord Enstone, who always rose to cues of that kind like a trout to a fly.

“Nonsense, Edward, you know very well it wrecked people’s lives right and left,” said Virginia.

“Not always, it didn’t. And people can be wrecked by too much freedom too. Look at Evadne,” said Lord Enstone, who could never forgive her for not being in love with Mark.

“Well, on the other hand, look at Sylvia,” Virginia pointed out, and Lord Enstone did so with visible pleasure.

“But after all, how do
we
know what Sylvia may be up to?” he inquired then genially. “Pretty enough to commit murder and nothing said about it, eh?”

“Evadne’s just unlucky,” Mark said, speaking as an old friend. “Everything she does makes a splash, somehow. Born to put her foot in it, I always say. Can’t help loving the little devil all the same.
Means
so damn’ well. Give you the shirt off her back, I mean.”

Stephen looked about him carefully, making sure that Oliver, who whether it was his own fault or not was after all Hermione’s father, had not joined their circle, and then said, “That’s the shirt, isn’t it, that Hermione is now wearing somewhat threadbare. And what does anybody here propose to do about it? And if not, why not?”

All eyes were turned upon him, with an interest entirely friendly. Except for Jeff and Sylvia and Virginia, the family had not yet grasped the fact that Stephen had added himself to the list of Evadne’s victims.

“I have tried everything I know to break up that combination,” said Stephen into their speculative silence. “Short of shooting Hermione, that is. I’m not quite ready to hang for it if there’s an easier way.”

“It’s not Hermione I mind so much, it’s that blasted Nazi,” said Mark. “I mean, we’d look silly, wouldn’t we, if Evadne up and married him.”

“Oh,
no!
” cried Rosalind, sitting up in her chair with a jerk. “Virginia, what are you thinking of, why don’t you—”

“Why don’t I
what?
”
retorted Virginia, cut to the quick. “Did any of
you
ever try to control Evadne when she gets a mission? I’m thoroughly sick about the whole thing, but there’s no way to lock her up here at Farthingale.”

“Cut off funds,” said Lord Enstone, offering his sovereign remedy for recalcitrant children.

“But I can’t cut off Hermione’s,” Virginia reminded him. “Not even Oliver can, since she came into her mother’s money.”

“Oh,
that
woman!” said Lord Enstone, out of an old feud. “Wish we’d none of us ever set eyes on her. Hermione’s just like her. Can’t think what Oliver was about, to beget a child like that.”

Stephen looked at him with the greatest admiration in the world and said he had often thought the same, only not so well put. This brought Lord Enstone’s attention to focus on him in some surprise.

“You in the running for Evadne?” he demanded.

“Yes, sir,” said Stephen, without flinching. “And I can’t even get to first base.”

“Wasting your time,” said Lord Enstone. “Ask Mark, here. He’s been trying for years.” (This was news to Stephen, and he sent a humorous, commiserating glance towards the unexceptional Mark, who responded with an airy salute.) “She only likes freaks and foreigners,” Lord Enstone consoled them collectively. “Serve her jolly well right if she got landed with one of them, like Rosalind. Why don’t you have a good talk to her, Rosalind? Tell her what’s what. You’re qualified to speak, if anyone is. Keep forgetting that Nazi fellow is your own son.”

“It’s something I prefer to forget, myself,” Rosalind replied quietly.

“You’re the one to deal with it, then,” said Lord Enstone, having got the idea well lodged. ‘Isn’t she, Virginia. Get Evadne down here and have Rosalind talk to her, straight from the shoulder.”

“It’s difficult to make them understand—especially if your own experience happened before they were born,” Rosalind murmured, and inwardly shuddered at the thought of discussing with Evadne the interview at Cleeve and its revelations. Not even Charles knew to this day why she had returned to him so badly shaken.
I
gave
him
mine.
Once more she stopped the ears of her memory against the words.
But
for
me
he
would
not
have
had
the
gun
….
I
gave
him
mine
…. She had given birth to a monster. Even Charles must never know that. It was a thing to be borne in decent silence, as best she could.

“It’s never any good to try to warn Evadne off with scarecrows, Edward, it only makes her more determined to demonstrate how harmless they are,” Virginia was beginning when Jeff, whose chair faced the house, said, “Oh, God, we’re in for it now!” and they saw coming towards them across the lawn from the open french windows of the drawing-room Evadne, Hermione, and Victor.

“What blasted cheek!” said Lord Enstone, and Rosalind rose in a single movement as though for flight, and dropped back into her chair again, silently, at the quick touch of her husband’s hand on her arm.

Virginia left her place at the tea-table and went to meet the newcomers, halting them on the grass well out of earshot, to give her outspoken family time to collect itself.

Victor had been having troubles of his own. Ribbentrop as the new German Ambassador to London was, in the English view, dropping brick after brick and not at all improving Anglo-German relations, except with a small pacifist cell of British society who were determined to get along with Nazi Germany at any cost. Closely questioned by his masters as to his own progress in cementing his connections. Victor had very
little to his credit. His attempted explanations that his mother’s titled husband chose to live the life of a recluse on his country estates, and that as a consequence she was buried alive there herself, were met with suspicion and incredulity. Victor was accused of incompetence and advised to improve his time—to show results, beyond attendance at some crack-pot religious meetings with a noticeably pretty girl.

It was not, of course, a matter of gaining access to plans and formulas and fortifications—nothing so simple as the operetta form of espionage was in Victor’s assignment to England. He was merely to infiltrate, to watch, listen, and whenever possible to undermine—and report back to Berlin in endless detail. Therefore, his masters desired to know, How about his Influence, Where were his Followers, Why had he not acquired more Good Will in the right places, What about the supposed disaffection among the English, the general
sub-rosa
willingness to co-operate with Fascism, the—Franco had just coined the phrase in Spain—the British Fifth Column? Victor could point to the Mosley people, and the Anglo-German Fellowship people. Ribbentrop knew about them, and was that
all?
The interviews would end on an implication that at this rate Victor would never amount to anything in the S.S.

Hermione’s telephone call had caught him when his morale was down. She sensed his depression and, knowing Evadne’s weakness for lame dogs, she advised him to come and share his sorrows, whatever they were. No engagement was concluded between them, they merely agreed that he was to ring up later when Evadne was in and ask if he might come to tea, and then work on her sympathies. Anything, Hermione thought recklessly as she hung up, to distract Evadne’s mind from that entrancing Stephen on the crest of his own wave. Evadne could never resist trying to help someone. If Victor appealed to her on the grounds of having been snubbed for being German, or of dreading an end to his London post, he would recapture her attention. And Victor had certainly been snubbed right and left by the family…. Hermione sat with her hand on the telephone, after their rather hurried conversation. Yes—if
Victor could be manoeuvred into another cold-shouldering by the family Evadne would fly to his defence and quarrel with them all, including Stephen …

It was at Hermione’s suggestion, therefore, when Victor came to tea, that they planned a weekend motor trip into the country, the three of them, if the fine weather held—on the grounds that they were all a bit stale and needed a holiday. They could stop overnight in some Cotswold village inn, invite themselves to tea at Farthingale on Sunday, and be back in London Sunday night. Evadne was railroaded into it against her better judgment, for she knew that Stephen and Sylvia were to be at Farthingale too that weekend, and Victor and Stephen did not mix.

She was not prepared to find Rosalind and Charles there as well, to say nothing of people from the Hall, drinking tea with the rest on the lawn. She understood that Rosalind had refused to receive Victor again after that first meeting at Cleeve, and she thought it very heartless indeed, without having the faintest idea what had taken place between them. She decided at once that on the whole it might be a good thing for them to have another opportunity to be friends, and she watched with a certain pride Victor’s stolid self-possession as he made the rounds of introductions, bowing, kissing hands, murmuring polite phrases, as though in fact he was an invited guest in good standing—until he came to Rosalind, stony-faced and silent in her chair. They all saw the reluctance with which she gave him her hand, they all saw it slip away from his as he bent to kiss it, saw him stiffen, saw Charles cover up by offering his own hand, and they all hastened to create a pleasant bustle about more cups and more chairs, which Evadne had requested from Bascombe as she came through the house.

Hermione, looking like a particularly self-satisfied cat, explained how they had been driving in the neighbourhood and found themselves parched for tea. Virginia dispensed it from a fresh pot newly made, Stephen handed round sandwiches, and Sylvia, wrought upon by the general nervous zeal to behave cordially or die, offered Victor a vacant chair at her
side, which was accepted with alacrity, and before long he was assuring her in audible tones that she was the perfect Nordic type which the Leader so much admired.

Virginia had no sooner poured out their three cups of tea, with another for herself to keep them company, than Lord Enstone stood up, saying with an overdone casualness that he was just going, and come along Mark, come along Mona, people invited to dinner at home and all that. With the Earl’s party on its feet, Rosalind and Charles were able to rise also and say that it was high time they pushed off, and this got all the men up, because of the ladies. When order was again restored round the tea-table, it was discovered that Mab and Jeff were missing, having made their getaway towards the summer-house down by the stream while no one was looking. To resume tea with seven empty chairs staring them in the face was a rather hollow procedure, but Virginia did her experienced and gracious best with it, and Victor, who had reclaimed his place beside Sylvia, seemed totally unaware of being treated, Evadne thought furiously, like a leper.

As Hermione had anticipated, all her fierce protectiveness and militant sense of justice rose up hotly to enfold Victor, solaced though he might be by Sylvia’s polite interest in his conversation. And she was especially nice to him during the drive home, which he attributed quite wrongly to the lavish attention he had paid to the little American with the idea of bringing home to Miss Evadne, who was inclined to be elusive, the self-evident fact that she was not the only personable young woman in the world.

Hermione was on the whole well satisfied with her manoeuvre. Uncle Edward had behaved most usefully, as had also Rosalind and Charles. Victor had made rather an ass of himself over Sylvia. And she herself had made a good impression, she believed, on Stephen, sitting beside him while she drank her tea and asking intelligent questions about the theatre, so that he at least had no opportunity to sit and moon at Evadne. And anyway, Mark’s goose appeared to be cooked for good.

It was along about now that Evadne began to notice, belatedly, a change in Hermione’s habits. Hitherto she had moped about the flat, often untidy and without make-up on days when no one was expected to call, and had made rather a point of having nothing to do on the occasions when Evadne had made engagements which did not include her. But now she seemed to have some secret life of her own, so that she would dress carefully and go out by herself for the whole afternoon, and even sometimes in the evening when Evadne went to a theatre or a concert in another party, and Hermione might be later coming in than she was sometimes, but always alone, and a little preoccupied, and very uncommunicative, so that without asking outright there was no knowing where she had been or with whom. On the rare occasions when Evadne did ask a casual question, as much from a wish to show polite interest as from curiosity, the reply was brief and vague—a concert, a film, a bus ride—until gradually the thing began to take on the proportions of a mystery. As though she was
meeting
someone, Evadne thought incredulously. As though she was—well, having a love affair. But I
think
I know everyone she does, and I can’t imagine who …

Because it had eased the situation in the flat a little, and made her own innocent programme simpler to carry out, with less aftermath of injured feelings and unspoken resentments, Evadne wanted to take no notice, and determined not to pry. But she couldn’t help wondering. And one day, dressing hurriedly to keep an engagement of her own when Hermione had already left the flat for the afternoon, she caught a ring in her last pair of silk stockings and made an ugly snag. Evadne was fussy about her stockings, and always washed them after each wearing, but had fallen behind with several pairs. There was no time to wash them out now, nor to run out and buy new ones.

If Hermione had been at home, Evadne would have thought nothing of asking to borrow a pair, and her request would have
been generously granted. With Hermione gone out, she hesitated only a moment and then went into Hermione’s bedroom and pulled open the top drawer of the bureau, where Hermione’s stockings were kept in tidy, rolled-up bundles. And at the back of the drawer, although in full view when it was opened, lay the sixpenny programme of Stephen’s show, with his picture on the front of it—not the big souvenir programme of the opening night, which they had all had and which was worth keeping, but the ordinary daily programme you got now. Evadne had been back to see the show again more than once, with friends, and had also seen it from behind, just for fun, but Hermione had never been one of those parties. Yet Hermione had the programme, and had kept it, so that Stephen’s face looked up from her top drawer.