Ned passed his cup and went on with the verse, his voice lingering over the words and giving them a curious emphasis.
‘O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied With a single thread of my own hand’s weaving.’
‘You must go and see Keats’s house in Hampstead,’ Leonora said, agitation rising in her, for “now the harmless little poem seemed almost to have some obscure and unpleasant meaning. But that was fanciful and ridiculous, surely. ‘We might all go together,’ she said more firmly. ‘I don’t think James has ever been.’
‘I’ll look forward to that,’ said Ned, getting up. ‘And now I must go. It’s been wonderful meeting you. You’ll tell Jimmie I came?’ There was a note of teasing doubt in the request.
‘Yes, I’ll tell him, of course—and you must come to luncheon.’
‘Luncheon,’ he savoured the word as something peculiarly English, ‘that’ll be delightful.’ He crinkled up his eyes in a smile and was gone.
Leonora closed the front door and leaned against it. She found that she was trembling. She had stood up bravely to her ordeal, she felt, and it had certainly been a good move to suggest some future meeting, but the poem lingered in her mind. Would other people —would James himself—see their relationship like that? she wondered. Going to the fruitwood mirror for reassurance she saw that she looked pale and tense. She felt suddenly too old to fight, but was one ever too old to fight for one’s love — would one’s hold on that be as tenacious as on life itself? She had always seen herself as a weak woman relying on men—especially on men like Humphrey —to help her through the daily round, but when it came to a real crisis perhaps she was stronger than any of them. Certainly stronger than James.
James had slept through most of the afternoon and woke up when it was beginning to get dark. At one point he thought he had heard the front door bell ring and Ned’s voice, but when he tried to listen there was silence and he decided he must have been dreaming.
Now he got out of bed and put on his dressing-gown. He felt lightheaded and in need of something to eat and drink, he couldn’t decide quite what. He went to the door and opened it, thinking he would go down to Leonora’s flat, but the house was silent. Perhaps she had gone out.
‘Leonora!’ he called.
‘Why, James, I thought you’d gone out. Have you been here all the time?’
‘Yes. I woke up not feeling well and I’ve been sleeping most of the day. I’ve got flu or something.’
‘My poor James—I had no idea. Have you had anything to eat?’
‘No, I didn’t feel like it and I hadn’t the energy . .
‘Get back into bed and I’ll bring you something.’
When Leonora returned with the artistically laid tray—soup and toast, scrambled egg and a bunch of black grapes—James had arranged himself on his pillows and was already feeling better. It was that time on Sunday evening when the bells start ringing for Evensong, which can be pleasant or melancholy according to one’s circumstances.
‘How soon it gets dark now,’ said Leonora, going to the window, ‘and all the sycamore leaves are falling —the garden’s full of them.’
‘I’ll tidy them up when I’m better,’ said James. He hated gardening but perhaps it was the least he could do for her.
They stayed in contented silence for a while, James picking delicately at his food and Leonora sitting on a chair by his bed.
‘Oh, by the way,’ she said at last, ‘I had a visitor this afternoon.’
A visitor—so he hadn’t been dreaming.
‘Your American friend, Ned.’
‘Ned? What’s he doing in London?’
‘Working at the British Museum, I gathered—he said he’d told you.’
James felt himself flushing at the cool tone of her voice, so lacking in reproach. It would have been better if she’d made a scene. He couldn’t remember now what he had told her about Ned. Certainly not a great deal. Really it could be said that he had deceived her again—first Phoebe and now Ned. He turned away towards the window. He could see a few leaves drifting down from the sycamore tree. Ned called this time of year the fall. He had a sudden impulse to run down and bury himself in those leaves, covering over his head and body in an extravagant gesture of concealment, return to the womb or whatever one called it. But then he imagined Leonora’s cool laughter or her unspoken ‘understanding’. He would never find a flat of his own. There was no escape from anything, ever. Now she was urging him to eat a few grapes.
‘One should always have grapes in the house,’ she said, ‘one never knows when they’ll come in useful.’
‘What did Ned say?’ he asked.
‘Oh, he was very charming. I’m thinking of giving a little luncheon party and asking him to meet a few of our friends. He’s really sweet.’
Hardly sweet, James thought, and yet now that Leonora had taken him over, who knew what he might become? She would arrange or adapt him to her satisfaction just as she had arranged Phoebe. Not to speak of the way she had arrangedjames himself. Yet he had the feeling that Ned might not be so easy to deal with. There was something basically intractable about him that would resist any kind of ‘arrangement’ on Leonora’s part …
‘You and me,’ Leonora was saying, ‘and Humphrey and Liz, of course. Do you think we need ask another woman? Whom do you suggest?’
‘Miss Caton,’ said James flippantly.
‘Darling, you are naughty! What a pity poor Miss Sharpe has fled to Majorca. I should have liked an opportunity to get to know her better, and Ned would have adored her—all that English literature.’
James reached out his hand and took another grape. He wished Leonora wouldn’t go on like this, for after all he wasn’t quite himself. He closed his eyes and to his relief she stopped talking.
XIX
There was no doubt in Leonora’s mind that something must be done about Ned, but ruthless action, even if it lay within her power, was apt to be upsetting and exhausting. It might well turn out to be like Hercules cutting off the Hydra’s head only to find that another had sprung up in its place. Obviously Ned was not to be as easily got rid of as Miss Foxe or Phoebe, who had so conveniently removed herself, yet he would be in England only for a year, such a short time compared with the whole of life. Starting with the lunch party today and then the visit they had planned to Keats’s house, what fun the three of them—Leonora, Ned and James—might have together. An exciting and dangerous prospect opened before her as she thought of it. Perhaps it would be best to reach a compromise whereby Ned could be woven into the fabric of their lives in such a way that he became an unobtrusive thread in the harmonious tapestry of the whole. Yet when he came into the room he immediately took the centre of the stage, the glitter of his personality making Leonora seem no more than an ageing overdressed woman, Liz a shrewish little nonentity, and James and Humphrey a callow young man with his pompous uncle.
‘Leonora, how wonderful to see you!’ Ned’s lips brushed her cheek, while his soft little hand rested for a moment on her arm.
She had not expected him to kiss her after only one meeting and it occurred to her that when it came to weaving people into the fabric of one’s life he had perhaps stolen a march on her.
James, handing drinks like a silently efficient manservant or hired waiter, was dismayed and embarrassed at the way things were going. He wished now that he had never mentioned Ned in that letter to his uncle, for it had not occurred to him that Humphrey would tell Leonora, that Ned would call at her house or that the two of them would get together in this unexpected way. He should have kept it all a secret—as he had kept Phoebe secret—but how could he have foreseen the way things would develop between him and Ned? Surely Leonora was not going everywhere with them? He brooded sulkily over this prospect and went with a bad grace into the kitchen to bring in the joint, a splendid piece of beef.
Humphrey rose to carve it. He was one of those men who are at their best with a carving knife and here was meat worthy of his ta
lent.
‘A terribly English meal, I’m afraid . . ‘ Leonora turned apologetically towards Ned.
‘Roast beef—that’s great!’ Ned smiled charmingly back at her. ‘And Yorkshire pudding, too — you must have known it was my favourite thing.’
Leonora was gratified to see what good appetites the men had, but she was too emotionally exhausted to eat much herself. Being with Ned was a great strain and James had hardly spoken a word since he arrived — what could be the matter with him? When Humphrey and James went away to the shop, taking Ned with them, she hoped Liz would leave too. But Liz, in the manner of some women, was determined to get the washing-up done and made for the kitchen where she proceeded to scrape up any bits of meat that were left into a dish for her cats.
‘James seems very taken with his new friend,’ she observed.
‘Oh? I didn’t really notice,’ said Leonora casually.
‘I was watching him when you were talking to Ned—his face was a study, as they say.’
‘Yes, poor James, he did get left out of the conversation, somehow. It’s so difficult, isn’t it, to bring everybody in.’
‘I wouldn’t trust Ned any further than I could throw him,’ said Liz rather smugly.
‘Well, it’s hardly a question of trusting him, is it?’
‘Oh, no—we’re well out of it, my dear.’ Liz spoke with the detachment of one who is past all emotional involvements, and by including Leonora with herself she was perhaps trying to warn her to draw back while there was still time. Yet another part of her wanted her to go on, to find out whether it was possible for the cold, proud and well-organised Leonora to suffer as she had suffered and so to provide an interesting spectacle, a kind of diversion from the boredom of everyday life. ‘I wonder what Humphrey thinks about it,’ she added, seeing that Leonora did not answer.
‘It’s not at all convenient,’ said Humphrey irritably. ‘You know I don’t like leaving Miss Caton by herself in the afternoons.’
It sounded almost as if his uncle feared she might be attacked or raped by a prospective buyer, thought James. ‘She can cope as well as I can,’ he said. ‘And I did promise Leonora I’d take her and Ned to see Keats’s house. He has to go there for his work, you know.’
Humphrey was silent, confronted by the force of a promise to Leonora and Ned’s ‘work’, though the latter cut no ice with him, as he put it. He was at a loss to understand this new turn things had taken since Ned had come into their lives. What was James up to? First a mistress and now a lover. And why was Leonora making such a fuss of Ned? For all his charm it was obvious that she didn’t like him. How much more sensible it would be for her to admit defeat and give up.
‘Very well, then,’ he said at last. ‘I shouldn’t like you to disappoint Leonora, of course, but don’t make a habit of it. A pity it’s such a wet afternoon,’ he added, not without satisfaction.
Leonora came out to the car in the beautiful iridescent raincoat she had worn when she went to meet James at the air terminal. One was not at one’s best in the rain, obviously, and one needed to be that now as never before. She had pictured a golden autumn afternoon for the excursion—season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, wasn’t it?—and in the past she and James had always been lucky in their weather.
‘I seem to have brought rain,’ said Ned complacently, as he kissed her cheek. ‘It was really glorious yesterday.’ He glanced at James, half smiling, but James was helping Leonora into the car and it was she who intercepted the look.
Yesterday had been Sunday and a fine day, certainly; she had heard James go out soon after breakfast and not return till late in the evening. She had tried not to imagine where he might have been and had made a point of not asking.
‘We shan’t be walking about outside,’ said James, ‘so there’s no need for any of us to get wet.’
All the same, the overcast skies and dripping rain spread a pall of sadness over the little house, with its simple bare rooms. There was nobody else looking over it except for a middle-aged woman wearing a mackintosh pixie hood and transparent rainboots over her shoes. She was carrying a shopping bag full of books, on top of which lay the brightly coloured packet of a frozen ‘dinner for one’. Leonora could see the artistically delineated slices of beef with dark brown gravy, a little round Yorkshire pudding, two mounds of mashed potato and brilliantly green peas. Her first feeling was her usual one of contempt for anybody who could live in this way, then, perhaps because growing unhappiness had made her more sensitive, she saw the woman going home to a cosy solitude, her dinner heated up in twenty-five minutes with no bother of preparation, books to read while she ate it, and the memory of a visit to Keats’s house to cherish. And now she caught a glimpse of her face, plain but radiant, as she looked up from one of the glass cases that held the touching relics. There were tears on her cheeks.
Leonora moved over towards a small conservatory where some late flowers, begonias and pelargoniums, were still in bloom. Bunches of grapes hanging from a vine reminded her of Phoebe’s cottage. How simple that had been compared with this! Depression overwhelmed her and seeing James and Ned some distance away, talking together in low voices, she felt as if she were already defeated. She wished now that she hadn’t come. Keats meant nothing to her except Ned’s voice on that Sunday afternoon, quoting those horrible lines about the dove.
‘Fanny Brawne’s engagement ring!’ he exclaimed in his rapturous way. ‘And the stone is almandine, it says here. What is it, Jimmie?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ said James, to whom Keats also meant nothing.
‘It looks like a garnet,’ said Leonora, who had now joined them.
‘Yes, I do believe it is,’ Ned agreed. He put his hand on her arm and gazed intently at her. ‘Leonora, I think you want your tea. You look exhausted,’ he added gently.
‘Have you had enough, Leonora, are you tired?’ James sounded as solicitous as ever, but now she wondered if he would have noticed if Ned had not spoken first.
‘Of course I’m not tired,’ she said rather sharply.
‘It is tiring wandering around museums—I know Mother always finds it so,’ said Ned, ‘and I do feel a bit guilty. But if you could know what this means to me …’
Leonora found herself wondering if it really did mean all that much to him. ‘Of course I understand,’ she said, ‘and it was my idea to come here, anyway.’
But now Ned, capricious as a child, suddenly decided that he had had enough. He demanded tea, and they must have muffins or hot buttered toast. And after that they must go and see the flat he had found for himself, ‘Ned’s pad’, as he called it.
Curiosity and a certain doggedness which a fragile woman can display even in the most unpromising situation led Leonora, tired as she undoubtedly was, to go with them to the house near Brompton Oratory (‘Catholic services are very much me,’ Ned had remarked) in which he had taken a furnished flat.
They entered the sitting-room which was in darkness. Ned switched on a reading lamp which gave just enough light for Leonora to obtain an impression of walls patterned in deep olive green leaves—almost a Morris paper—and furniture upholstered in black leather. A large black rug of synthetic fur covered half the floor and in one corner was a red divan heaped with cushions, also of a fur-like material. The general impression Was disturbing in some undefined way, perhaps because it was so very much not the kind of room Leonora or anyone she knew would have chosen. It reminded her of the dark unsympathetic basement where Colin served out salads.
‘It belongs to an actor who’s away filming,’ said James, as if sensing that some kind of comment was called for.
‘Then it’s not your taste?’ Leonora asked Ned, feeling that it easily might have been.
‘Not exactly — but it’s amusing, don’t you think? And I do feel the bedroom’s rather me.’ He flung open a door through which could be seen an exceptionally wide bed covered in mauve velvet.
‘Is it a comfortable bed?’ Leonora asked, foolishly, she r
ealised.
‘I guess so,’ said Ned, ‘though maybe comfort isn’t all I go for.’
‘That striped paper is pretty,’ said Leonora, doing her best.
They returned to the sitting-room where drinks were offered. There was Scotch or vodka or creme de menthe. Leonora accepted half a glass of plain tonic water, but she could feel a headache coming on and put it down untouched after the first sip. James had Scotch and Ned made himself a creme de menthe on the rocks. There was a great business of crushing the ice in some special way which he and James seemed to find amusing. Leonora was unable to see why and felt increasingly embarrassed at the atmosphere which seemed to be creating itself around the two young men. She was just about to suggest that James might run her home when Ned said in his sweetest tone, ‘Leonora’s tired and it’s been rather selfish of us to make her stay out so long. We’ve had a lovely afternoon and now I’m going to ring for a taxi to take her home.’
He was at the telephone—an elegant ‘antique’ instrument—before Leonora could protest that of course James would take her. Nor did James make any attempt to offer. He just sat in one of the black leather chairs brooding over the ice cubes melting in his glass. When the taxi arrived they both went down with her. Both kissed her, goodbyes and thanks were uttered and they went back into the house together.
‘Well,Jimmie, congratulations!’ Ned turned towards James and they faced each other in the narrow box of the lift. ‘So you finally did it!’
‘Did what?’
‘Shook off Leonora, of course! I thought she’d never go-‘
‘I felt rather bad about not taking her home,’ James admitted.
‘For God’s sake—we got her a taxi, didn’t we? She could’ve gone home on a bus—lots of people do.’
‘Not Leonora, somehow. Perhaps I should give her a ring later on to see that she got home all right.’
‘Jimmie, really I What are we going to do about this terrible conscience of yours?’