Late and Soon Read online

  “We don’t think so. She’s only once been here since I had the puppy and of course I said I hadn’t yet decided on a name. Actually, she kept on making rather dim suggestions, like Rover and Tray and Faithful.”

  Lieutenant Banks began to laugh, and Jess laughed too.

  Valentine felt relieved.

  She leant back in her chair and looked at her younger daughter.

  Primrose resented being looked at so intensely that her mother could hardly ever bear to do so, although no single word had passed between them on the subject.

  Jess was not only quite unself-conscious, but she was scarcely sufficiently interested in people to notice whether they looked at her or whether they didn’t. She was tall and slight, much fairer than Valentine had ever been, and with exactly Humphrey’s squarely-shaped, open face, with a well-cut, firm, insensitive mouth, rather thick snub nose and big, straight-gazing brown eyes.

  She looked her best in the clothes that she most often wore, riding-breeches and a high-necked wool jumper, under an open tweed riding-coat.

  Her head was bare and her hair, which was flaxen and very pretty, was just shoulder-length and attractively curled at the ends.

  Valentine wondered, as she wondered almost every day of her life, what Humphrey would think if he could suddenly walk into Coombe now, after twelve years.

  Supposing he were able to come back?

  The place was hardly altered at all. There was a painting of himself, that his mother had insisted upon having done from a photograph after his death and that now hung above Valentine’s desk.

  She had never liked it, and thought it a bad painting — shrill and crude in colouring and with only a superficial resemblance to the original. But she had never had it moved, even after the death of her mother-in-law.

  It was almost the only new thing in the room except for the rose-patterned chintzes. The year before Humphrey died, and for several years afterwards, the covers had been blue, with a violet stripe.

  Valentine remembered them clearly.

  Humphrey, if he could come back, would expect to see that familiar colouring. And the Spanish leather screen that now stood opposite to where she was sitting had been in one of the spare bedrooms in Humphrey’s day. It had been moved to its now permanent station in the hall when the General complained of a draught behind his habitual armchair.

  The spaniel, Sally, had grown old and fat. She was nearly fourteen.

  Humphrey had probably never seen her at all. But he had had two spaniels himself—both of them dead, now.

  It was the people over whom Humphrey might well hesitate longest.

  Jess, when he saw her last, had been a baby of five years old, backward of speech and not particularly pretty. He had not taken a great deal of notice of her, perhaps because he was disappointed that she had not been a boy.

  Impossible that he should ever recognize that baby in the tall, sprawling, graceful figure of the seventeen-year-old Jess, whose artless use of a candidly vermilion lipstick only served to emphasize her appearance of young, open-air innocence.

  Humphrey would wonder who the officer was and would dismiss him with a phrase, “Not one of us, what.”

  Reggie? He’d know Reggie, of course, but the arthritis had only begun a year or two before Humphrey’s death. Reggie hadn’t been a cripple on two sticks before that. Seated, though, as he was now, he wouldn’t have changed so very much. Humphrey would think he was on a visit. It wouldn’t cross his mind that Reggie could be living at Coombe, paying a very small contribution to the household expenses and bringing with him his dog.

  And then, thought Valentine as she had often thought before, there was herself. Humphrey would look first of all at her. She was the person he had cared for most in his life.

  He had left her with brown hair — now it was heavily streaked with a silvery grey. There were lines round her eyes and her mouth, and she had lost her colour. She used a pale-rose lip-stick, whereas she had used none at all in his lifetime. Her figure had not altered: she was as slim as she had been at twenty. And yet there was a difference. It was a soft, pliant slimness still but it was, indefinably, not that of youth. One realized that, looking at Primrose or Jessica.

  All the same, Humphrey would know her immediately. He would find her altered only in the sense of having grown older. To this conclusion Valentine always came, in her habitual fantasy of Humphrey’s return to the home from which he had been carried, in his coffin, twelve years earlier.

  Long ago she had been startled by, and had subsequently answered, the question with which her own heart had confronted her.

  If that impossible return could take place, if Humphrey could come back, a living man, from the grave, would it awaken happiness in her?

  Valentine knew without any doubt that the answer was No.

  Humphrey had never given her either happiness or unhappiness. At best, their relationship had achieved a little pleasure, at most, some discontent.

  Valentine, having known both happiness and unhappiness in her earliest youth, could still, at moments, vividly recall either.

  “Oh, that’ll be absolutely wizard!” cried Jess in her high, gay voice. “I don’t suppose I shall be here myself much longer, I’m expecting to join up any minute practically — but it’ll cheer up poor darling aunt Sophy like anything. She adores soldiers. D’you suppose they’ll ever take her for a walk?”

  “The Colonel’s a terrific walker.”

  “Gosh!” said Jess thoughtfully. “Fancy a colonel.”

  She did not elucidate the exact grounds of the passing sensation of awe that had evidently prompted the exclamation.

  It might have been the thought of the Colonel’s rank, or his probable age, or his walking proclivities.

  Lieutenant Banks said:

  “The Colonel’s the most marvellous man that ever lived,” in quite inexpressive tones. Then at last he got up.

  “Well, thanks frightfully, Lady Arbell.”

  “Must you go? Why don’t you stay to tea?” Jess asked.

  “It’s terribly kind of you but I can’t. I’m supposed to be back at three o’clock and it’s ten minutes past four.”

  “Come on Sunday then. I expect I’ll still be here. You could have a bath if you liked, and then tea, and then supper.”

  The young man’s eyes turned towards Valentine.

  She ratified Jessica’s invitation.

  “Thanks frightfully, Lady Arbell.”

  “Bring one or two other chaps with you, and we might play games or something,” cried Jess.

  “Yes, do,” Valentine said.

  Lieutenant Banks said that this was simply terrific, and absolutely marvellously kind, and completely okay so far as he knew but might he ring up?

  Jess picked up aunt Sophy, holding her under her arm so that the puppy’s legs all dangled in the air, and conducted Banks to the glass doors and through them.

  There they remained, silhouetted against the light, and there they could be heard from time to time in apparently animated discussion punctuated by peals of laughter.

  Valentine smiled involuntarily, exhilarated by the spontaneity of the sounds.

  She looked at the same time rather apologetically towards her brother who was never in the least exhilarated by the behaviour of very young people, but quite the contrary.

  General Levallois, however, was apparently not thinking about Jess and the officer.

  He met his sister’s eyes meditatively.

  “Lonergan,” he said. “Wasn’t that the name of that feller in Rome?”

  “Yes.”

  “Funny thing, if it should turn out to be the same one.”

  “It isn’t an uncommon name, in Ireland.”

  “There aren’t any uncommon names in Ireland,” said the General.

  “How did you remember, Reggie? You were in India at the time.”

  “Mother wrote reams, as she always did. Anyway, I never forget a name. You’ve never seen or heard of him since, have you?�
��

  “Never,” said Valentine.

  She smiled.

  “It was only a week, you know.”

  “What was only a week?” demanded Jess from behind her.

  “A very silly business,” declared the General.

  “That happened more than twenty-five years ago,” added Valentine gently.

  “Mummie! Were you mixed up in it?”

  “Yes. I was younger than you are now.”

  Jess gave her mother an affectionate, amused, incredulous look, before dropping on the floor beside her dog.

  “Fancy you being mixed up in any very silly business!” she ejaculated.

  Leaving them in the hall Valentine went up the steep, curving staircase with its worn carpet, almost threadbare, to her bedroom, shivering as she moved out of the range of the fire.

  The stairs, the large circular-railed landing above and the bedrooms were all unheated, and their temperature seemed lower than that of the wet, mild January afternoon out of doors.

  Valentine’s room was a large, high one with two big windows that looked over the drive and the front of the park.

  The furniture was shabby, of mixed periods, and there was not very much of it in proportion to the size of the room.

  The walnut double-bed had already been in place, facing the windows, when Humphrey Arbell’s mother had come to Coombe as a bride.

  Valentine slowly changed her shoes, looked at her face and hair in the looking-glass without much attention and automatically pushed the loose silvery wave over her forehead into position.

  She felt faintly disturbed.

  It was not that she was afraid of meeting Rory Lonergan — if it should be Rory Lonergan.

  On the contrary, she’d be disappointed if it wasn’t Rory Lonergan. The idea of seeing him again brought with it a curious emotional excitement, partly amused and partly sentimental.

  Her perturbation, Valentine found, arose from a faint sense of remorse that she had, by implication, accepted her brother’s trivial estimate of the “very silly business” of twenty-five years earlier.

  Reggie would necessarily see it like that — would have seen it like that even if he’d known far more about it than he ever had known.

  But Valentine was clearly aware that what had happened that week in Rome in the spring of nineteen hundred and fourteen had held for her a reality that she had never found since.

  II

  The evening meal at Coombe was still called dinner. It was announced, in a breathless and inaudible manner, by a fifteen-year-old parlour-maid.

  The General nightly struggled into a patched and faded smoking-jacket of maroon velvet. Valentine Arbell — shuddering with cold — put on a three-year-old black chiffon afternoon dress and a thick Chinese shawl of embroidered silk of which the fringes caught in every available piece of furniture whenever she moved.

  Jess, under violent protest, still obeyed the rule that compelled her to exchange warm and comfortable breeches or a tweed skirt and wool jumper for an outgrown silk or cotton frock from the previous summer.

  “But once I’ve gone into uniform, mummie, never again,” she said.

  Valentine believed her.

  As it was, she was always rather surprised that Jess should still do as she was told about changing for dinner when Primrose, at an earlier age, had flatly refused to do so.

  “Come on, aunt Sophy,” cried Jess hilariously as the mongrel rushed, falling over its own paws, at the young parlour-maid standing in the doorway.

  Jess dashed at aunt Sophy, picked her up and allowed her face to be licked all over.

  “Don’t!” said Valentine involuntarily.

  “Put the thing down, Jess,” commanded the General. “Carting it about like that!”

  Jess ignored them both, without ill-will but from sheer absorption in her dog and her own preoccupations.

  Valentine sometimes wondered what those preoccupations were. Jess appeared so artless, so outspoken — yet never did she give one the slightest clue as to what her inmost thoughts might be.

  She stood back now, politely, to let her mother precede her into the dining-room. The General shuffled along at his own pace with Sally, the spaniel, morosely crawling at his heels. She was old and fat, and hated leaving the fire in the hall for the unwarmed dining-room.

  It was another large room and although shutters protected the three French windows behind their faded blue brocade curtains, a piercing draught always came from beneath the service door at the far end of the room.

  It was impossible not to shudder, at the temperature of the dining-room.

  The General made his nightly observation:

  “This room is like an ice-house.”

  The oval walnut table, looking not unlike a desert island in the middle of an arctic sea, was laid with wineglasses that were scarcely ever used, silver that required daily polishing, and a centrepiece of a Paul Lamerie silver rose-bowl.

  Valentine disentangled the fringe of her, shawl from the arm of her chair and sat down at the head of the table, and General Levallois placed himself at the other end.

  Jess shrieked directions to the dogs, knocked over a glass, laughed, and took her place facing the windows.

  The conversation, which consisted of isolated observations and uninspired rejoinders, was spaced across long intervals of silence, and the first word was uttered by the General after Ivy, the maid, had left the room.

  “These plates are stone-cold, as usual.”

  “I’ve told her, Reggie, but you know it’s only Mrs. Ditchley. It’s not as though she was a proper cook.”

  “Shall we ever have a proper cook again, mummie?”

  “I don’t think so, darling. It seems extremely unlikely that anybody will have one, at least until the war’s over.”

  “And then we’ll all be Communists, under Stalin, and there’ll be no servants,” said Jess. She glanced at her uncle out of the corners of her eyes.

  “I’m not going to rise, Jessica.”

  Jess and Valentine both laughed, and the General looked pleased with himself.

  When the few spoonfuls of thin potato soup were finished, Jess got up, pretended to fall over aunt Sophy and played with her for a moment, and then went and jerked the old-fashioned china bell-handle, painted with roses and pansies, at the side of the empty fireplace.

  The harsh, metallic clanging that ensued could be heard in the distance.

  Jess sat down again.

  She talked to the dogs in an undertone. The General put on his glasses and read the little white menu-card, in its silver holder, that he always expected to find on the table in front of him in the evenings, and that Valentine always wrote out for him.

  He inspected it without exhilaration, and pushed it away again.

  Ivy came in again, changed the plates, and handed round first a silver entrée dish, and then two vegetable dishes.

  “Do we have to have baked cod every single day?” Jess asked plaintively.

  “It was all I could get.”

  Much later on, General Levallois addressed his sister.

  “I thought we’d agreed not to have the potatoes boiled every time they appear.”

  “I don’t suppose Mrs. Ditchley has many ideas beyond boiling them. And it’s not easy to spare any fat for frying them or doing anything amusing. I’ll speak to her to-morrow.”

  Valentine made these rejoinders almost as she might have spoken them in her sleep, so familiar were they.

  She knew that the food was uninteresting, ill-prepared, and lacking in variety, and she regretted it, mildly, on her brother’s account, rather more on Jessica’s.

  Both Primrose and Jess had taken a Domestic Science course at school: on Primrose it had apparently made no impression whatever. Jess had acquired some skill at laundry-work and sometimes washed and ironed her own clothes. She said that she hated cooking, house-work and sewing, and never intended to do any of them.

  Valentine rather wonderingly remembered her own educatio
n, in the various capitals of Europe into which her father’s diplomatic career had taken him.

  She had learnt two languages besides her own, and knew the rules of precedence at a dinner-party, and” she had been a beautiful ballroom dancer and had had a good seat on a horse.

  She could think of nothing else that she had ever acquired.

  Certainly not the art of housekeeping in England on an inadequate income. She had never done it well, even in Humphrey’s lifetime.

  Contrary to what a good many people had repeatedly told her, Valentine did not really believe that she could have learned. She disliked everything that she did know about housekeeping and could not persuade herself that it was of sufficiently intrinsic importance to justify the expenditure of time, money and nervous energy that it seemed to require.

  “Mummie, d’you think those officers will really be billeted here, this time?”

  “They might be, Jess. But we never heard any more of the other ones who said they were coming.”

  “Still, a Colonel. They can’t go chopping and changing about with him. I hope he’ll come and I hope Buster’ll be the other one.”

  “Buster?”

  “Lieutenant Banks is always called Buster. He told me so himself. I thought he was divine. Mummie! d’you mean to say we’re having a savoury again, instead of a sweet?”

  Jess picked up, and then threw down, the small knife and fork that had led her to this deduction.

  “My dear, it’s almost impossible to get anything to make a sweet of, nowadays. And you know, we did have a pudding at lunch.”

  “Well, God help this poor Colonel person, that’s all, if he comes here expecting to be fed.”

  Jessica’s lamentations were seldom meant to be taken seriously.

  When Ivy handed round the dish where sardines lay upon dark and brittle fragments of toast, it was not Jess but General Levallois who complained.

  “I thought we’d just been eating fish, Val?”

  “I know we have. Really and truly, Reggie, we’ve got to take what we can get nowadays.”

  “Certainly we have. But I don’t think this woman has much idea of what’s what. Surely she can arrange things so that we don’t have two fish courses one on top of the other.”