‘Dignity, eh? You’re a fine one to chitter about dignity. I suppose you thought your father was dignified when he blew his brains out after he’d made a mess of his life?’
‘That’s unnecessary, Julius, and very cruel.’
Rachel turned away, pale, her mouth trembling.
Julius laughed. ‘Oh, don’t be a wet blanket, Rache. I don’t interfere with you much. You enjoy your concerts and your books and the highbrow talk of your intellectual pals. Let Gabriel and me alone to enjoy our things. We’re different.’
Rachel turned before leaving the room, her hand on the door.
‘You don’t know what a mistake you’re making,’ she said slowly. ‘Gabriel’s barely seventeen and before she’s twenty-one she’ll have had everything. What sort of a life is it going to be for her - after that? Have you ever thought?’
Julius shrugged his shoulders.
‘When I was twenty-one I was starving in a garret and working fifteen hours a day as a baker’s apprentice. I want my daughter to hold the world in her hands.’ There was a silence, and then:
‘Sometimes,’ said Rachel, ‘I’m very sorry for you both.’ She hesitated a moment as though she would say something more, and then she went out of the room.
Julius yawned and stretched out his arms.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ he said.
Gabriel laughed softly and reached for a cigarette. ‘Jealous,’ she said.
‘D’you think so?’ Julius sat up. ‘Oh! hell, that’s funny, isn’t it?’
The idea excited him. He pulled the box of cigarettes away from Gabriel.
‘Don’t smoke,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘Not until you’re eighteen.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Gabriel. ‘I do as I like,’ and she lit a cigarette.
‘You’ve never done it before,’ he said. ‘What’s it mean?’
‘A gesture,’ she said, blinking her eyelids, and blowing a cloud in his face.
‘If we get this cruising boat,’ he said, ‘we’ll go down to the Mediterranean, shall we? Down to Sicily and up the Adriatic, and you shall show me Venice.’
‘Yes - sometime.’
‘Not this summer?’
‘No - I want to sail at Cowes.’
‘We might go down in the winter.’
‘I shall be hunting this winter as usual.’
‘The following summer?’
‘Oh!’ She rose in irritation. ‘Don’t harp at me, it bores me so. I’ll go with you when I want to and not before.’
He flushed under his skin, hating her.
‘You’re such a bitch,’ he said.
She took no notice of him. She was looking at a yachting paper.
‘By the way, I forgot to tell you I was in Cartier’s yesterday and chose a bracelet for you,’ he said; ‘a double row of diamonds, twisted. I told them to alter the clasp, it didn’t show up enough.’
‘Thanks,’ she said, and went on reading the paper.
Julius wondered whether she was sick of bracelets. She would perhaps have been better pleased with him had he chosen a necklace instead. He made a mental note to order a necklace in the morning. Meanwhile he poured himself out a drink and waited moodily until she would be ready to be friends with him again.
The five months of yachting passed swiftly for Gabriel. She threw herself and her boundless energy into this new sport with the same fervour that she had given to horse-racing. Here was racing of a different sort - the thrill of a narrow-built, slender cutter heeling in a trough of a sea, the tall mast straining, the stiff breeze whistling in the huge spread of canvas, the lee rail awash, the thud and kick of the helm.
The skipper who trained Gabriel was a Clyde man, one of the most experienced yachtsmen afloat. Julius spared no expense to find the best teacher. The boat, a brand-new six-metre built that year, was named Adieu Sagesse - the suggestion of Julius.
Then there was the cruising yacht, a schooner of nearly two hundred tons, a beautiful thing of bravado and extravagance; one of those luxury vessels all white paint, scrolled gold and polished brass, with a deck like ballroom parquet. Wanderer she was called. She wandered between Southampton and Cowes and no farther. The Lévys used her perhaps half a dozen times that first summer. Gabriel could not be dragged away from her six-metre. She was racing mad - she spent all day and every day at the helm of Adieu Sagesse, the Clyde skipper at her elbow and Julius a passenger, generally in the way.
Julius, crouching in the cockpit that sloped at an angle of forty-five, wondered if all this was safe, and as he looked at Gabriel with her frown of concentration, her teeth biting her lip, and her hair swept by the wind, he was seized with a terror lest they should founder and drown, and he would only have had two years of her, paltry and insignificant. Only two years of companionship and so little yet to show for it; she still self-contained and a stranger in many ways. He thought of the passion that had been hers for riding, and now this fever for sailing that had taken its place. And he wondered with a curious sense of excitement what would be the next craze of her impetuous will, into what channels would her stream of energy wander, and whether this flow of spirits was the advance guard of high pressure that would be rapture and emotion and ecstasy.
It was an endless sensation of pleasure to him that he was able to do the things that she did, that his health and energy equalled hers, and that his fifty-odd years were no burden to him. He might have been without wisdom and married late, and then grown old before she was ready for him. Rachel had been decorative and helpful as a wife, but her utility was over now. Gabriel would make as good a hostess when she came out next year. She was modern, too, in advance of her age.
Rachel was getting fat like her mother before her; she had the set, heavy, Dreyfus look about her. She could not progress, she was early-Edwardian. He was conscious that Rachel’s expression irritated him now; it was sullen, discontented; he was aware that he did not want to see much of her. She did well to stay down at Granby or in Grosvenor Square. He was genial to her but no more than this; there was little friendship and no intimacy between them.
Rachel, for her part, joined her husband and daughter at intervals from a motive of pride. She could not bear that her friends should pity her. She knew instinctively the gossip that touched them - Julius, Gabriel and herself - the slight contempt that clings about a neglected wife, the lies, the curiosity. The absurd rumours of divorce, the cheap newspaper minds of men and women.
She loathed this sort of publicity, the indignity and squalor attached to any knowledge of people’s private affairs.
So she appeared now and again on board the Wanderer and in the house at Cowes, and later up at Melton during the autumn, tactful and calm, her face a mask, studiously agreeable to Gabriel and Julius and their friends, knowing in her heart that her presence was a blind convention of her own, and that they all laughed at her behind her back.
She, too, waited for Gabriel to pass to the next craze, hoping with bitter, grim tenacity that the girl of eighteen would wake up suddenly and throw away her crude, unbroken, dangerous charm and fall in love and lose her individuality. Then only would she be harmless and natural; the wife of some man or even his mistress - Rachel did not care - and lead her own life in her own way, possessed and held at last. Rachel would see the man as a saviour, whoever he should be. Then Julius would understand what a fool he had made of himself these last years, he would realise his age and his whitening hairs, he would come back to Rachel and Granby, and their old interests together. Side by side they would drift into the serenity of their middle years.
So Rachel, like a prisoner who awaits the final verdict, bided her time amongst the roses at Granby, reading Schopenhauer, petting her griffon, worrying herself over a pain in her side that was sometimes imaginary and sometimes real.
The yachting season finished at the end of September, and the boats were laid up for the winter.
Gabriel looked forward to a good time at Melto
n. Papa would be there, of course, and the house always filled with a crowd. Not Mother, she hoped. Mother brought her disapproving personality and stifled the house in an atmosphere of gloom. She always wanted to talk about books and music, and made such a fool of herself in front of the hunting crowd. Nobody felt at her ease. Papa would go sulky and red under the skin like a schoolboy; he was always difficult to manage when Mother was around. He seemed to think Mother would be continually listening at doors or peeping through keyholes.
‘What the devil does it matter if she does?’ Gabriel would say, losing her temper, and then he would cross silently to a door and fling it open, hoping to surprise Rachel in the act of eavesdropping, and find nobody, of course.
‘Don’t be such an idiot,’ said Gabriel; but Papa would run his hands through his hair and become temperamental. ‘I can’t stand it - I’m going up to Town,’ and he would rush away and shout at the servant to tell Mander to bring round the Rolls, he was going to London.
Gabriel lit a cigarette and shrugged her shoulders. If he liked to behave like a criminal fleeing from justice he could for all she cared. She knew there would be a wire from him in a couple of hours’ time, sent off from some post office in the Midlands, and then another wire from London when he arrived, and then the telephone the next morning before breakfast.
‘I’m coming back,’ he would say, his voice faint on the long-distance call. ‘I can’t stand this.’
‘All right,’ she would answer.
‘I’m going down to the City this morning to see what’s going on, and then I’ll be right back. Did you sleep?’
‘Like a top - I always do.’
‘It’s more than I did. Listen: do you want anything?’
‘No.’
‘I’ll find time to go into Cartier’s and see if they’ve got anything good.’
‘Oh, don’t bother.’
‘Yes - I want to. It makes an interest. It’s damned cold in Town. Would you like another fur coat? - you were twittering about a chinchilla the other day - here - are you there? - are you there? - don’t cut me off.’
‘I’ve got to go, Papa; the horses are waiting, and I don’t want to be late. Good-bye.’
She hung up on him, laughing to herself. God! what a crazy man. She was glad he was coming back. And crossing the hall she would see the figure of her mother standing in the doorway of the breakfast-room, making a pretence of glancing at the morning paper, then looking up. ‘Was that your father?’
‘Yes, he’s fed up with Town.’
‘Didn’t he ask to speak to me?’
‘No - he was in a hurry.’
‘I wish he wouldn’t be so restless, always chopping and changing about. It makes arrangements so difficult. Besides, he dashed off yesterday without even telling me.’
‘I shouldn’t let it worry me, if I were you,’ said Gabriel. ‘He’s always doing things like that. I never let it interfere with my plans.’ She flicked her boot with her riding crop and crossed the hall, whistling to the dogs.
Typical of Mother to moon about and imagine household arrangements were being disturbed. As if it mattered whether people were early or late for meals, or whether the numbers were odd, or if the servants were put out. Servants were paid, weren’t they? She resented her mother dealing with the Melton staff. Gabriel felt they were her own property and responsibility. She couldn’t think why Mother bothered to traipse up to Melton, anyway. She obviously did not enjoy it. Everything ran so smoothly when the household consisted of Papa and herself alone. Guests did not matter one way or the other.
It was a great relief when Mother finally developed a severe pain in her side and, taking alarm, at once declared she must return to Grosvenor Square and undergo some treatment. Gabriel felt as though she had been living under some strain and could now breathe and be herself again.
Rachel sensed the obvious relief of her husband and daughter when she told them she was motoring up to London. As she stood on the steps, while the suit-cases were put into the car, and her maid fussed round her with her rug and her dog, it was as though she were a guest being sped away who had made too long a stay. A guest in her own house. And Gabriel was the hostess, hatless, at her ease, belonging there, giving the order to the chauffeur that Rachel herself should be giving: ‘There won’t be room for those flowers inside, Mander; they’ll get crushed. They’ll have to go in front. Look out ...’
And Julius, too boisterously cheerful, saying without sincerity: ‘Now, Rache, take things quietly in London. Don’t overtire yourself. Get that fellow to put you right, and don’t stand any nonsense from him. Good-bye, my dear.’
The duty kiss, first Julius, then Gabriel, the climb into the car, exhausting with so many rugs and coats, and the dog, and her hot-water bottle. The maid in front with the chauffeur.
‘Good-bye.’ The forced smile at them through the window, the wave of her hand, and then the car gliding away down the drive. She craned to look back through the window, but they had turned already up the steps, dismissing her from their minds, Gabriel with her arm round her father and he calling the dogs. They had their day in front of them, cut and divided from hers.
Rachel tried to picture the anti-climax if she suddenly tapped on the glass and told Mander to go back, she had changed her mind. She wished she had the courage. And as the car drove out of the gates and to the main road Rachel thought of the long dreary drive that lay ahead of her until she reached London, with the straight unhelpful backs of the maid and the chauffeur in front of her, her only consolation the water bottle that eased the pain in her side, and the warm body of the griffon on her knee.
But to Julius and Gabriel left behind it seemed as though the air were free once more and the house welcomed them in the old way; the hall was wider, clearer, most beautifully theirs again; even the dogs jumped and wagged their tails, barking loudly at Julius, who flipped at them with his stick.
The sun shone from a placid sky. It had rained in the night, and the harsh white frost that had stopped hunting for a whole week was turned to soft mud and gravel and rich damp turf.
‘If this blessed weather holds, we can turn out again to-morrow, ’ said Gabriel.‘Come on, let’s wander along to the stables.’ And they set off round the corner of the house, holding each other’s arms, keeping the same step, singing the same song:‘Two lovely black eyes—
Oh! what a surprise!
I got them for kissing another man’s wife—
Two lovely black eyes.’
So the winter passed and the early spring, no dull moment to Gabriel, whose entire life was spent in the saddle.
Once more hunting came to an end, and it was good-bye to Melton and the trek south to Newmarket at the beginning of April - racing again, and the Spring Meeting at Epsom - Gay Lord driving Gabriel to fury by failing to win the City and Suburban, and her temper restored again because Follow Me proved his stamina the next week at Newmarket.
Then May came along, and for the next few months of the summer Gabriel could not be dragged away from the Island except for the Derby and Ascot week in June and Goodwood later. And her time was spent at the helm of Adieu Sagesse or in luxurious idleness in a deck-chair on the Wanderer, gramophone at hand, a crowd of young people about her.
Whether it was because the summer of 1913 was notoriously wet and sailing conditions were seldom ideal, rain and gales day after day in July, or whether the very atmosphere at Cowes and the life on the water held no longer quite the same thrill to her because the novelty was gone, Gabriel found herself losing interest in regattas and races; she began to weary of the one topic of conversation on the lips of her yachting friends.
What was the fun in Adieu Sagesse when a half gale made sailing impossible, or, worse still, when a flat calm and a steady drizzle made sailing merely a dragging and a boring pastime?
The Island was ugly in the rain; there was nothing to do. It was absurd to go across to London, because at that time of the year London was dead.
Gran
by? Mother was down at Granby. Ill again - she had a nurse on hand now. Nobody knew quite what was the matter with her. It occurred to Gabriel that her mother must lead a strangely empty existence, never caring much about things. Odd of her. She supposed it was middle age. And yet Papa was several years older than Mother, and nobody could call his existence dreary; he was always so enthusiastic, so terribly alive. He had a personality that stood out above everybody else’s; he made other men - young men especially - look so stupid, so callow and inexperienced. Papa was young too, but in a different way. Subtle, queer, there was a glamour about him.
Perhaps one of the reasons she was feeling restless and bored was because Papa had been spending more time in London this summer. He was gambling in the City again, and getting the same thrill out of it that she had got last year out of sailing. She had driven down to his offices once, when she was passing through London, and he had not been expecting her, of course. He was busy. She had been told to wait in some room as though she were nobody, some creature without an appointment. And she had not been able to stand that; she had walked straight through into his private room without knocking. He was speaking through the telephone. He had looked up when she burst into the room, and instead of throwing down the receiver and leaping up from his chair as she expected, he put his hand over the mouthpiece for one second and said to her: ‘Sit down - don’t talk,’ and then on with his rapid, unintelligible conversation. He was smiling, but it was not because she had come into the room. For the first time in her life Gabriel realised that this was power and Julius Lévy held it between his hands. She watched him speaking into the telephone, and as she looked at him who was so deep in his game, taking not the slightest interest in her, it was as though the faint imprint of a hand touched her and lingered indescribably, mysterious and pleasing, a new sensation that was disturbing and exciting at the same time, curiously physical like a pain in her body, and it had never come to her before.