Penny’s eyes followed his glance, looked at the girl beside Carol for a brief second, and then smiled at George once more.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, and a sudden coldness made her voice elaborately polite. “But I really am rather late.”
* * *
So that was Eleanor.
Penny walked thoughtfully down the smooth sandstone steps into the street. Then, as she saw its length stretch before her towards Baker House, she began to hurry.
Her excuse to George had been perfectly honest, she told herself. She was late.
She arrived breathlessly in the entrance-hall as the large gong gave its final warning. Marston was waiting near the notice-board. Around her, moving slowly towards the dining-room, was the usual Saturday night crowd, some dressed to go out, some dressed to stay in. Faces, pretty and plain, laughing and glum, expectant and resigned. All shapes and colours of faces, thin and broad, short and long, pink, sallow, brown, yellow. Marston signalled, and Penny struggled through the mass of girls towards the notice-board. She smiled to those she knew as she passed them, and some spoke. Fahdi, the Egyptian, was going to the dance tonight, for she had washed her hair, and it sprang out from her head in a thick black, curling mop. So was Bennett, for she was wearing the new dress and the imitation roses over which there had been an hour’s discussion last night. MacEwan from New Zealand gave her a friendly, “Hello, there!” Neri in her sari: beautifully ironed, and six yards around the hem. Evans from Cardiff wanted to borrow that new Faulkner. Mathers from the West Indies suggested a party in her room tonight (bring your own cup, and spoon if you like guava jelly). And at last Penny reached the notice-board.
“That looks simply marvellous,” she said, eyeing Marston’s long black dress and red brocade jacket. But Marston was looking worried.
“He was here,” she said, “an hour ago. He could not manage to come tomorrow, so he came tonight instead.”
“David?”
“Yes. We introduced ourselves, and I told him you would be back about seven.”
“Why didn’t you telephone me?”
“Darling, it is good for him to find you aren’t always sitting about, waiting for him. I told him you were at a party, frankly. And I also said that I thought you might be free this evening, but I didn’t know: there was a dance at College which I had been trying to persuade you to go to. Do him a lot of good to realise there are such things.”
Penny looked at Marston. “Where did he go?” she asked, trying to keep her voice even.
“Out. Don’t worry. He will ’phone any moment now, and try to persuade you not to go to the dance.”
Penny shook her head miserably. “Not David,” she said slowly.
“Look, Lorrimer, I was only trying to help you.”
“I know,” Penny said. That was the trouble: people trying to help. But Marston couldn’t know just how much time or money it cost one, who had little of either to spare, to come up to London. Nor had she remembered that the Fanes’ invitation had come that morning, so that David had not heard about it yet. Penny began to climb the stairs. The hall was empty now. From the dining-room came the clatter of plates and the sudden outburst of talk as Grace was completed.
“What about dinner, such as it is?” Marston called. And then, as Penny did not answer her, had not even heard her, she went into the dining-room. “Absolute nonsense,” she said to herself.
Penny walked slowly up the stairs to her room, closed the door wearily, sat on the edge of her bed without turning on the light. She wondered where David had gone this evening. And she wouldn’t see him tomorrow. He would not ’phone either: she knew her David. Probably, at this very moment he was trying not to think that she went to parties all the time and never told him. He would argue with himself that if she wanted to go to dances he was not going to dissuade her.
“Oh, David!” she said aloud. And blast Marston. Her way isn’t my way, or David’s. Blast her.
She crossed over to the window, trying to calm herself. After all, things could be explained in letters. And things could also be misunderstood. It suddenly appeared to her that a very small, very trivial incident could cause a lot of damage.
Gower Street was quiet now. London’s Sunday sleep always seemed to begin here on Saturday evening. A few people hurried to keep a dinner engagement or strolled out for a pleasant night. Occasional taxis, some cars, but no more lorries or vans: a quiet street, an empty, lifeless street, a desolate street. And then a man came out of the darkness, halted under the lamp-post at the corner almost opposite Baker House, and stood there looking at its rows of windows. It was David. Penny rapped on the glass sharply, but she was too high up for anyone in the street to hear. She had forgotten to turn on the light, so that he could not even have seen her. But she only remembered these things as she reached the hall, and scrawled her name in the “Out until 11.30” register. He will be gone, she told herself, and dropped the pen, and ran towards the door. The sedate maid on hall duty rose from her chair and stared at the slamming door. Well, really, she thought, and opened the door curiously.
She saw Miss Lorrimer running—running, mind you— across Gower Street, and heard the tearing screech of a taxi as it braked suddenly. The cabby was kicking up no end of a fuss, too. So there hadn’t been an accident, although that hadn’t been Miss Lorrimer’s fault. The maid shook her head disapprovingly and closed the door. A fine way to behave, giving people a turn like that? And for what? Just what in the whole wide world was worth that? She sat down in her corner once more, picked up her copy of this week’s Pam’s Very Own, and turned to the third instalment of young Lord Utterley’s still unrequited passion for the beautiful Muriel Midgeley.
18
DINNER AT MARINELLI’S
At first David thought Penny had been hit by the taxi. But in the next moment she was on the pavement beside him, laughing as if she had not even noticed.
“Damn fool,” he said roughly, and caught her arm. Then he kissed her.
The taxi driver leaned forward to add his comment. David turned to the man with an ugly look on his face, but Penny said, “Please, David,” and her hand on his arm pulled him gently away. Penny, David had to remind himself, hated scenes. But it would have given him a lot of pleasure to have had one: that was the mood he had been in for this last hour or so.
“It was my fault, David,” she was saying, in a very subdued way for Penny. “But I didn’t see him. I didn’t see anything except you. And I was so afraid that you might have disappeared into London before I could run down all those stairs and out of the door.”
It was difficult, David thought, to be very polite, charming, and just a little diffident. That was what he had intended to be. Remembering too how he had felt in that moment when he was sure she had been hit, he halted, looked at her, and then kissed her so hard that her lower lip was cut.
“Just to make sure you are really here,” he said, as he reached for his handkerchief. “Sorry, darling. But I happen to love you, you see. You shouldn’t be allowed out without a bodyguard.”
Penny hugged his arm. Everything was all right again... She was with David, and there were at least three hours left to them before he had to catch that train. She would explain all about Marston and the Fanes to him. But not at the moment: at the moment explanations would only seem like excuses. Later, once dinner had begun, she would tell him all about it. For explanations were necessary. She felt that instinctively. You could reason out that adults did not have to explain to each other, but instinct was so often more accurate than reasoning. At least, Penny thought, when she acted on instinct with David, she was always glad: and when she reasoned things out she was often sorry she had not followed her first intuition. Reasoning might be good for facts and figures, but it wasn’t enough for human beings. For instance, this sort of thing could easily happen again—a trivial thing hardly worth explaining it might seem. And it could happen again... and again... always small and trivial, always hardly worth explaining. And
then, when some really dangerous crisis between David and herself did arise—and human beings always seemed to have periodic crises—it would be all the past differences, unexplained, which might make understanding so difficult. Yes, Penny decided, she would tell David later, tell him casually and amusingly. That would be the best time, once they had settled comfortably at a table in Marinelli’s and dinner had begun.
They crossed over Tottenham Court Road, busy and garish, with that early-Saturday-night feeling when women put on their smartest clothes and men have extra money in their pockets, when the evening stretches ahead pleasantly and everything is still to be enjoyed. No disappointments, no disenchantments yet, David thought. A good hour of the week, welcoming everyone with a bright smile, saying, “Now go ahead; enjoy yourselves.” A good hour, perhaps one of the best hours in the week. Something of the feeling of expectancy in the air caught him up too. He looked at Penny with pride: once they were inside Marinelli’s and seated at a table for two, once he had ordered some food and wine, he would tell her. All the excitement which had accompanied him to London on his train journey began to return to him. God, what a disappointment it had been to arrive at Baker House and find Penny wasn’t there. What a hellish hour, wandering round dark Bloomsbury squares by himself, arguing with himself, persuading, wondering, while all the time the amazing news which had put him into such high spirits on the train was turning into a frustrated chunk of gloom.
From Tottenham Court Road a narrow side-street led them to Charlotte Street, empty and quiet at this hour. Only the little foreign restaurants and shops were brightly lit, small oases of warmth and hospitality in a cold, dark street.
Marinelli’s was crowded, as usual, with journalists and students, painters and writers. When you entered you felt almost blinded, suffocated, deafened. Then you got accustomed to the bright light, and the warmth was pleasant, and the Babel of noise made you feel you were one of a group and not a lonely individual. You could ignore, or you could take part in, the arguments going on around the large tables. No one worried whether you did or did not. And, as well as the voices explaining and expounding and laughing, there were the orders shouted in Italian towards the kitchen window, where the face of Marinelli’s eldest son would appear every now and again to shout back. There was the noise of plates and glasses as Marinelli’s four daughters served—with generous smiles, Italian phrases, and flashing glances. There were the sudden bursts of conversation between Mrs. Marinelli, at the cash-desk by the door, and Mr. Marinelli, moving among the tables.
Now, as Penny and David entered the narrow, glass-panelled door with its three missing letters (M RINEL it informed you), Mrs. Marinelli gave them a loud, Neapolitan welcome, which would also act as a warning to her husband to find room for two more. Marinelli’s youngest son Giuseppe, balancing plates of steaming spaghetti with its cardinal caps of rich red sauce, shouted that there was a free table upstairs.
“For two?” David asked.
“Sí sí.” He laughed heartily. Always a table for two.
“Near window,” Mr. Marinelli put in. He pointed to his legs, shook his head, smiled apologetically for not leading them upstairs personally, pursed his mouth, raised his shoulders, gestured with his hands. Mr. Marinelli had, as he had once explained in detail, very close veins.
As they climbed the narrow wooden stairs, so tightly built against the yellow plaster wall, with its hand-painted panels (views of Naples done by Mr. Marinelli’s second son, helped by an artist who had needed a month of free dinners) and its bright pink paper flowers fashioned by one of Mr. Marinelli’s daughters, the one with the slow, lazy smile of La Gioconda), David said, “There are three reasons why I like this place. No one stops talking to bother looking at us. We aren’t expected to leave the minute we finish coffee. And I get you to myself.”
He paused, and the lightness went out of his voice. “At least, as much as I can get you to myself at present.” Then they sat down at the small table beside a yellow-curtained window, and he pretended to be very matter-of-fact in seeing that she was comfortably settled and that dinner was ordered. Chicken cacciatore, he decided: tonight called for something more elaborate than spaghetti. And Chianti too. Giuseppe, who always made a point of serving them, no matter where they had found a table, took the order quickly and bustled away with his wide grin and cheery “Sí sí, signore. Subito.”
David stretched his hand across the white tablecloth and gripped Penny’s hand. “Well,” he said, “aren’t you going to ask me why I came to London tonight?”
Penny, who had been wishing that Giuseppe would hurry up with the soup so that she could then begin to explain about the Fanes’ party and have done with the whole stupid thing, looked startled.
“Darling, I’m sorry,” she said quickly, and shook her head at her own stupidity. “I’ve been sort of worried in a small way, and that makes one slow in the uptake.”
“What sort of worries?” he asked, forgetting his own news.
“Nothing important. They can wait until you tell me why you came to London.” She looked at him anxiously. “Good news?” she asked hesitatingly. Yes, it was good, she decided. She smiled suddenly, wholeheartedly, and as he watched the deep blue of her eyes he thought of the laughing waters around Inchnamurren on a sunlit day.
“Did I ever tell you how beautiful you are?” he asked.
“Much too often for the sake of my vanity. David, what is your news?”
“Or that I love you?” He was smiling too.
“David, what is it?”
He was serious again. “Desperately? Forever?”
“Darling, what is—” She fell silent, and the colour in her cheeks mounted. She said in a very low voice, “I love you too, David.”
He waited.
“Forever, David.”
“You don’t say that often enough.”
“It is about all that I do say in my letters.”
“Still not often enough. I want to hear it every day, not just read it. Every day, every night. You know what I want.”
Then both were silent, both were thinking of last Sunday. He watched her face, with its emotions changing, following so quickly one on the other. He tightened his grasp on her wrist.
“Don’t worry, darling,” he said. “It is my fault. I shouldn’t have even let you see how I really feel. I tried to write you about it this week, but it is difficult to put it down adequately on paper. Sometimes you need expression in voice or eyes to help words to speak in the way you want them to speak. So I had to see you tonight. I began to worry I might have lost you.” And tonight, in that miserable waiting-room at Baker House, he had believed that he had lost her: this was the beginning of the flight, he had thought. And he had walked for an hour around the squares, watching lamplight on wet pavements and straggling naked branches, feeling the coldness of February strike into his heart. He smiled now, as he looked at her, but there was still uncertainty in his eyes. “Did you begin to dislike me last week?” he asked half jokingly, but he was never more serious as he waited for the answer.
“David,” Penny said gently, and shook her head slowly, and there was so much love in her face that he could say nothing.
“It is my fault,” she said. “It is just that I don’t want to be— to be rushed. Or perhaps I am a coward and full of inhibitions. I’ve got to be so sure in my own mind that I have no fears or doubts or anything. And yet I am sure I love you. I’m full of contradictions too, it seems. I love you, and I hurt you because I take love so seriously.”
“Don’t I?”
“Yes. I know you do. That is why I feel so inadequate. I shouldn’t need time to decide, I shouldn’t have any battle to fight with my mind. I do love you. And you love me. And nothing else matters. I know that. I know that I am so happy with you that every other happiness gets smaller and smaller. And yet, I’m afraid, and I hesitate. I let you make love to me, love as violent as last Sunday’s. And yet I’m afraid and I hesitate. Although I want you to go on loving m
e and making love to me. What’s wrong with me, David? I am not being honest, am I?” She shook her head slowly, answering herself, disliking the answer. Then she went on, her voice now emotionless, arguing with herself as she had argued all this last week, “Lillian Marston, for instance... She has had several men, and she has no misgivings. Yet she has never loved one of them in the way I love you. And she has never been loved in the way you love me either. I don’t mean to say that she doesn’t know what love is. But there is a casual quality about her way of loving. She calls it freedom.”
Penny hesitated again, and then her voice became tense as she continued. “I think that only means she is afraid of going into love so deeply that she could never fall in love again. She feels it is too dangerous, in case he changed and fell out of love with her somehow. One could feel very alone, then, if one had loved so much that there was nothing left to give anyone else.”
David had been watching her face. Now he leaned forward and said quickly, “Is that what is worrying you about us, Penny? That I’ll fall out of love with you? Good God, Penny!” The idea was so new to him, so ludicrous, that he almost laughed.
“Penny, there’s no answer to that until we reach a ripe old age and I’ll say to you, ‘See, we are still together, darling.’ That’s the only answer, I suppose.”
She said nothing, tried to smile and didn’t, as if she were afraid to let any expression come over her face. She was very near tears.
“Darling, don’t!” David said. “Please! It isn’t your fault; you must not think that. And all week I’ve been blaming myself and saying it is all my fault. Do you know, it isn’t either of us who is to blame? It isn’t your fault that you don’t want me enough”— he felt her hand stiffen as he said that—“or my fault that I want you too much. If you weren’t so damned pretty, if I didn’t love you so damned much, it would be easier to wait until I got a job and money and could marry you. You know that, Penny. And whatever happens I am going to marry you. You know it, and I know it. So I’ll get you one day, whether it is next month or next year or five years from now. Only, don’t leave me, Penny. Never. Hang on to me. Don’t...”