Friends and Lovers

  Bunny acknowledged that fact modestly.

  “Thirty-one pounds,” Penny said, “and that includes pots and pans and things. Thirty-one pounds two-and-ninepence, to be exactly exact.”

  Bunny’s usual quick phrase was somewhat slow in coming. Then he said, with a bright smile, “Yes, that was more or less what I guessed.” He looked round the room once more. “Amusing, really.”

  The visit ended with Bunny still resisting slightly, but obviously attracted to the idea. It would take three or four weeks before Penny would learn whether it had been successfully presented to him or not. And then, if he did accept the idea and financed a new branch of his firm, with quite a new name, to cater for people who had more taste than excess money, Penny would probably have to fight in her own way to keep the idea as she had imagined it.

  “So far so good,” said Lillian Marston, after Bunny had left with protestations of regret at having to simply tear himself away. “He never makes a song and dance out of his goodbyes unless he feels rather good about something. I think you hooked him, sinker and all. But why didn’t you show him the folder?”

  Penny, busy clearing the overflowing ashtrays, straightening the cushions where Bunny had slumped all over them, poured another glass of sherry for Marston. “Here, you deserve this,” she said, bringing over the glass to Marston. “The folder—frankly, I thought he had as much as he could swallow at one time.”

  Marston regarded her curiously. “You know, you get on surprisingly well with him. Do you really like him?”

  “As much as he likes me. Which is limited, of course, for he is a limited kind of man. I suppose we do get on quite well together. You see, he isn’t afraid of me.”

  “Is he afraid of me?” Marston asked.

  “Terribly,” Penny said, with a wide smile.

  “You make me sound like a predatory female,” Marston said lightly, and rose to go. She thought she was changing the subject when she asked, “When is your David coming to see all this?” She waved a graceful hand around the room.

  “This week-end,” Penny said, and then regretted her frankness for no thinkable reason at all. “My grandfather is arriving tomorrow,” she added quickly. “And Bunny has given me the afternoon off. Isn’t that marvellous?”

  “Amazing,” Marston said. “And your grandfather is coming all the way from his island?”

  “Well, he is really going to visit Oxford. He and Walter Chaundler are thinking of collaborating on another book, you know. But, of course, he is spending a day or two in London to see me.”

  “An emissary from the family? An advance scout, as it were?”

  “Quite possibly.”

  Marston caught some of the anxiety which lay behind the brief answer. “Oh... Well, he is bound to see that you are happy here.” Happy. There was that word again, blast it. It had slipped out as usual. She went on quickly, concentrating on the room, “Now I begin to see how you must have hated Baker House. I really wouldn’t mind having a place like this myself. Bunny was very acute when he said that you had given it some of your charm.”

  She was relieved to see Penny’s smile come back. She glanced at her watch. “Late again,” she said cheerfully. “I am meeting Chris for dinner.” And then, with comic emphasis on dark omen, “We are going to Have It Out tonight.”

  But later, in the street, she felt a touch of irritation. Why did she always have to bring in the word “happy” when she was talking to Penelope Lorrimer? Of course she didn’t want a room like that, or a life like that. Then why say it? Poor old Penny, she thought, and felt better. Poor old Penny, she had to be cheered up some way: she had undertaken far too much. My role, Lillian Marston thought, will become more and more depressing: Lord, how awful to have condemned myself to a future of acting the sympathetic aunt. God, I couldn’t bear it. When David and Penny break up I’ll disappear on a holiday to the Continent or something. I couldn’t bear it.

  33

  HAMPTON COURT REVISITED

  The first greeting was affectionate, but restrained. They both said, much too politely, how well each was looking, and how were they? Dr. MacIntyre then walked about the room, pretending he was stiff after so much sitting in a train. Without any comment he noticed Penelope’s drawing-board with a half-finished design tacked to it, her bookcase with its well-filled shelves, the reproductions of Utrillo and Rousseau on the walls, and David’s photograph on the table beside her work. She was nervous, he realised, as he turned away from the photograph, and that too depressed him. He did not like London, he hated nowadays the fuss of travelling, and he had left his last two chapters in very bad shape on his desk in the study at Inchnamurren. For weeks now his daughter’s worried letters had invaded the peace of his island. And, if only to stop their dirge, he had visited Edinburgh. There, in spite of a lot of discussion (once Moira and Betty were out of the room), he was still no nearer to understanding the problem of his favourite granddaughter. “I shall go and see Penelope,” he told Mary and her husband finally. “And that is what you both ought to have done weeks ago.”

  But now, watching his granddaughter, he suddenly realised why Mary had been so worried over her. It was not, as he had been told in Edinburgh so repeatedly, that Penelope needed advice and help, that she was living in great unhappiness, carefully disguised in her letters out of pride and pigheadedness. But, rather, it was only that Mary had begun to realise that Penelope was now in no need of advice or help, that the child-parent relationship had been broken, and would never be resumed. He was beginning to wish he had never attempted the journey at all. I am a curious interferer, he thought: that is how I must seem, and that is how I feel.

  He sat down in the green armchair and elbowed a yellow cushion out of his way. “H’m,” he said, in some surprise, “comfortable!” That was his only remark about the room.

  Penelope sat down on the floor, as she always used to do when she came to see him in his study. There she was, wearing a neat black suit instead of a sweater and skirt, looking thinner, paler, but somehow prettier. Pretty? Stupid word. She was reaching beauty. And no woman ever looked beautiful unless she had some inner happiness. Beauty was not a surface quality. He studied her covertly. She was not so anxious now. There was even a hint of amusement in the deep blue eyes watching him so steadily, as if they were saying, “This is a joke which you and I are sharing, without even needing to tell it.” The little monkey, he thought with affection and pride, and smiled openly.

  “Well,” he said, looked round the pleasant room, looked back at Penny, and then drew his pipe out of his pocket and stretched the legs comfortably. Penny relaxed too.

  “This is wonderful,” she said, her eyes sparkling with delight. “How glad I am to see you!” She rose, hugged him, and then sat down once more in front of him, her legs sideways, her right arm supporting the weight of her body, her left hand clasping her ankles. She wore a plain signet ring on its third finger. She began to talk, answering his questions, plunging with all her old enthusiasm and frankness into the details of her new life— her work, her friends, her interests, what she had seen and done since she came to London, the Slade, Baker House, this room, the new ideas which her job had stimulated. Her grandfather listened critically, but he was surprised in spite of himself. He was glad now that he had made this journey to London. She had not thrown away her chances, as Mary and Charles insisted. She was developing new ones, through new influences, that was all.

  He purposely kept off the subject of David. It was embarrassing, anyway, to think that the girl, still so much the Penny he had known at Inchnamurren, had become a woman. It is always a shock to older people, even to the most sympathetic, to realise that the children they have loved are now capable of a quite different kind of love.

  But the subject of David did crop up, and afterwards Dr. MacIntyre was inclined to consider it had been no accident.

  Penny had been talking about painting, and about the present dominance of the French schools. She was beginning to believe that to r
epeat their techniques, to try to paint in their manner, might produce an adept canvas, but at best it was only being an echo. “If there is anything of real value in a painter,” she was saying, “he has got to find his own expression. He should learn from others, but he shouldn’t become an echo, or a part of a fashion. That is true of poetry too. Perhaps that is what is wrong with so many young poets today. They must be in the fashion, even if it kills their own natural inspiration. It is the thing today to write uglily, they seem to persuade themselves. So let us have no more beauty. That would date us: we’d be called Georgians or something equally damning. As if beauty could ever be outdated.”

  “Poets reflect the times,” her grandfather said. “The world is ugly and harsh today.” He was listening with concealed amusement, a touch of pride, and much pleasure. Where had she picked up that idea, he wondered.

  “Anyone can see that. We need the poets to show us the beauty that still exists, however hidden. That’s what poets are for...”

  She looked, and looked naturally enough as her grandfather had to admit, at the top row of the bookcase beside the armchair.

  “I see you’ve been collecting some poetry there,” he said, as his glance followed hers. “Isn’t that something new for you?”

  His hand went out automatically, and he picked up a volume, and let the pages ripple slowly through his fingers. He halted at the group of poems called Michael Robartes and the Dancer. Yes, he was thinking, let a poet clothe his conceptions with new images of striking beauty. Let him give richness and life to his ideas, phrased in such sound that those of us who listen will remember their music. Penny had said, That’s what poets are for... Yes, that is what poets are for.

  His eyes paused at The Second Coming, and he turned over no more pages, but let himself read it once more, silently, slowly:

  Turning and turning in the widening gyre

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

  The best lack all conviction, while the worst

  Are full of passionate intensity.

  Surely some revelation is at hand;

  Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

  The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

  When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

  Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

  A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

  A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

  Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

  Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

  The darkness drops again; but now I know

  That twenty centuries of stony sleep

  Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.

  And what rough beast, its hour come round at last.

  Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

  Penny let him read and said nothing; and because she saw that something had moved him deeply—for when he was finished he let the book lie on his lap for a moment, his eyes fixed broodingly before him—she did not even dare ask what poem it had been. Then he suddenly closed the book, replaced it quickly in its narrow place on the shelf beside another volume of Yeats, and was once more back with her in the room.

  She said, “David has been giving me these books. I am sure he thinks—although he has never actually said it, of course—that I don’t read enough poetry. So this is his way of propagandising me.”

  “And does it work?”

  She smiled and nodded, and then she laughed. “Yes,” she admitted.

  Dr. MacIntyre lit his pipe very carefully. And then, as his silence became too obvious, and Penny would not speak, he was forced to say, “And how is David?”

  And that was the way in which the subject of David and Penny was introduced. Now Dr. MacIntyre asked no more questions, but let her tell him what her good sense chose to tell. He had only to watch Penelope, to listen to the earnestness behind her words, to see the light in her eyes when she talked of David or the worry there when she spoke of her family, to know that she was neither irresponsible nor thoughtless. That was what he had wanted to know.

  Now he realised that this “affair,” as Mary and Charles Lorrimer would insist on calling it, was not something flaunted as a piece of youthful bravado. “Temporary affair,” Charles had said, emphasising both words bitterly. “Temporary” was the one word which Dr. MacIntyre himself would not have forgiven.

  “So you see, Grandfather—” Penny ended. She left her words there, adding nothing. She was watching him anxiously.

  He measured his words carefully. “I see that you have a considerable enthusiasm for this young man,” he remarked dryly. And my journey is not yet over, he reminded himself. I shall have no peace of mind now until I see David Bosworth, to discover for myself if his enthusiasm for Penny is equally considerable and permanent. That is all I want to feel. Then I shall write Mary and Charles that the only thing they should worry over is this refusal of theirs to let Penelope and David be married. “Now what about some fresh air? I always feel suffocated in London,” he said, and rose to his feet.

  Penny suggested Hampton Court. “I was there in March with David,” she said. “You’ll get plenty of fresh air. I remember I caught a cold.” She spoke the words happily, as if catching a cold could be an enjoyable experience.

  “I haven’t been there for almost thirty years,” her grandfather admitted. “But if you have visited it so recently you’ll make a very good guide.”

  “I’ll be responsible for the geography,” Penny promised, “if you, as the historian, will supply the dates.”

  But, strangely enough, once they did arrive out at Hampton Court, Penny was not a very good guide. Her memory, usually clear and accurate, seemed to have deserted her. Faced with Clock Court, Base Court, Fountain Court, Chapel Court, Round Kitchen Court, she became bewildered. And inside the Palace of almost a thousand rooms she was even less capable. From the Colonnade at the south end of the Clock Court she led her grandfather up a large noble staircase which surely was the approach to the Great Hall. Instead they found themselves in an oak-panelled room surrounded by weapons.

  “Well,” her grandfather said philosophically, “I suppose I had to see the King’s Guard Room, anyway. Much more important than the Great Hall, I’m sure. Now we shall try for Queen Anne’s Drawing Room and end up in Henry the Eighth’s Wine Cellar.”

  Penny looked at him ruefully. “I’m awfully sorry,” she said. She was remembering that her grandfather prided himself on wasting no time if he had to go sightseeing. Once he had suggested that the Oxford English Dictionary should bring its definition of tourist more up to date. “Tourist: a man who gets lost, a man with shortening temper, a man with sore feet. Cf. detour.”

  “Not at all,” he said, with a smile, as if he were highly enough amused by an idea, now forming, about her last visit here. “And this kind of sightseeing really is a great improvement over the usual variety: this has all the joy of the unexpected.”

  “I do remember the Board Walk and the gardens and the Tijou Screen,” Penelope protested. She added, with a smile to match her grandfather’s, “Once I find them, that is.”

  They did eventually, with the help of a guide-book and directions from two guides.

  “There’s the screen of panels,” Penny said with relief, looking towards the set of tall wrought-iron gates leading to the river.

  “Extremely sharp memory, considering how unobtrusive they are.”

  Penny’s cheeks reddened, and there was an amused apology in the way she glanced at him.

  Then she settled her arm comfortably on her grandfather’s, and paced slowly with him through the gardens. “At least,” she remarked appeasingly, “you are getting fresh air.”

  “Is that what it is? I was puzzled for a moment.”

>   Penny thought, Everything is all right. He isn’t angry with me about David. He never is angry when he starts teasing me... She smiled at her grandfather. He was walking, she suddenly noticed, more slowly than she remembered.

  He was saying, “Now that I have begun this journey I shall make the most of it. I am going to Oxford to see Chaundler, probably for a week or two. Then I shall go to Paris to see Latisse at the Sorbonne. There are some points about the summing up in my book which I want to discuss with him. Then I shall return to London by July. Unless I am tempted to take a little trip with Latisse into the Beaune country. That might help to inspire me in that lecture at the Sorbonne if I am asked to give it—”

  “Will you see David in Oxford?” Penny asked.

  “I hope so. You told me he was working hard, but perhaps he can spare an hour or so for me.”

  “Of course he will. He wants to see you, I know.”

  “That was what he said in his last letter to me.” Dr. MacIntyre paused, and then asked quite simply, “When are you going to see him next?”

  Penelope looked squarely at her grandfather. “He is coming to London this week-end,” she said. “Then, after that, I shan’t see him until his Finals are over.”

  “And then?”

  “We have still to discuss that. We shall probably make the decision this week-end.”

  “I hope it will be the right one, Penelope.”

  “What is ‘right’? Right for Mother and Father? Or right for David and me?”

  Dr. MacIntyre hesitated. “It is a pity—” he began and then halted.

  “Yes, I know. There did not have to be any choice like this. It was forced on us.”

  “Out of the best of motives, remember: your father and mother love you.”

  Penny was silent. “I know,” she said at last. “That is what makes everything so very difficult, so. ” Her voice trailed away in dejection. She watched the white and yellow butterflies fluttering so undecidedly over the green lawn and its wide border of flowers. Then her voice hardened, and there was her first touch of bitterness when she said, “They have had strange ways of showing their love recently. They don’t even write, but set Moira to find out what she can about me through her letters. Why don’t they write themselves? Why don’t they realise that even if they were back in the days of shutting up a daughter in an attic room with bread and water I still wouldn’t change my mind?”