Somewhere in the house a telephone-bell rang, and a footman came out on to the terrace.
‘Lucia, I know that's for you,’ said Adele. ‘Wherever you are, somebody wants you on the telephone. If you were in the middle of the Sahara, a telephone would ring for you from the sands of the desert. Yes? Who is it for?’ she said to the footman.
‘Mrs Lucas, my lady,’ he said.
Lucia got up, quite delighted.
‘You're always chaffing me, Adele,’ she said. ‘What a nuisance the telephone is. One never gets a rest from it. But I won't be a moment.’
She tripped off.
‘Tony, there's a great deal to talk about,’ said Adele quickly. ‘Now what's the situation between the lovers? Perfect understanding or a quarrel? And who has been ringing her up? What would you bet that it was –’
‘Alf,’ said Tony.
‘I wonder. Tony, about the lovers. There's something. I never saw such superb indifference. How I shall laugh at Marcia. She's producing no effect at all. Lucia doesn't take the slightest notice. I knew she would be great. Last night we had a wonderful talk in Marcia's room, till Aggie was an ass. There she is again. Now we shall know.’
Lucia came quickly along the terrace.
‘Adele dear,’ she said. ‘Would it be dreadful of me if I left this afternoon? They've rung me up from Riseholme. Georgie rang me up. My Pepino is very far from well. Nothing really anxious, but he's in bed and he's alone. I think I had better go.’
‘Oh, my dear,’ said Adele, ‘of course you shall do precisely as you wish. I'm dreadfully sorry: so shall we all be if you go. But if you feel you would be easier in your mind –’
Lucia looked round on all the brilliant little groups. She was leaving the most wonderful party: it was the highest perch she had reached yet. On the other hand she was leaving her lover, which was a compensation. But she truly didn't think of any of these things.
‘My poor old Pepino,’ she said. ‘I must go, Adele.’
10
Today, the last of August, Pepino had been allowed for the first time to go out and have a half-hour's quiet strolling in the garden and sit in the sun. His illness which had caused Lucia to recall herself had been serious, and for a few days he had been dangerously ill with pneumonia. After turning a bad corner he had made satisfactory progress.
Lucia, who for these weeks had been wholly admirable, would have gone out with him now, but the doctor, after his visit, had said he wanted to have a talk with her, and for twenty minutes or so they had held colloquy in the music-room. Then, on his departure, she sat there a few minutes more, arranged her ideas, and went out to join Pepino.
‘Such a good cheering talk, caro,’ she said. ‘There never was a perfect convalescer – my dear, what a word – as you. You're a prize-patient. All you'e got to do is to go on exactly as you're doing, doing a little more, and a little more every day, and in a month's time you‘ll be ever so strong again. Such a good constitution.’
‘And no sea voyage?’ asked Pepino. The dread prospect had been dangled before him at one time.
‘Not unless they think a month or two on the Riviera in the winter might be advisable. Then the sea voyage from Dover to Calais, but no more than that. Now I know what you're thinking about. You told me that we couldn't manage Aix this August because of expense, so how are we to manage two months of Cannes?’
Lucia paused a moment.
‘That delicious story of dear Marcia's,’ she said, ‘about those cousins of hers who had to retrench. After talking everything over they decided that all the retrenchment they could possibly make was to have no coffee after lunch. But we can manage better than that…*
Lucia paused again. Pepino had had enough of movement under his own steam, and they had seated themselves in the sunny little arbour by the sundial, which had so many appropriate mottoes carved on it.
‘The doctor told me too that it would be most unwise of you to attempt to live in London for any solid period,’ she said. ‘Fogs, sunlessness, damp darkness: all bad. And I know again what's in your kind head. You think I adore London, and can spend a month or two there in the autumn, and in the spring, coming down here for weekends. But I haven't the slightest intention of doing anything of the kind. I'm not going to be up there alone. Besides, where are the dibs, as that sweet little Alf said, where are the dibs to come from for our Riviera?’
‘Let the house for the winter then?’ said Pepino.
‘Excellent idea, if we could be certain of letting it. But we can't be certain of letting it, and all the time a stream of rates and taxes, and caretakers. It would be wretched to be always anxious about it, and always counting the dibs. I've been going into what we spent there this summer, caro, and it staggered me. What I vote for, is to sell it. I'm not going to use it without you, and you're not going to use it at all. You know how I looked forward to being there for your sake, your club, the Reading Room at the British Museum, the Astronomer-Royal, but now that's all kaput, as Tony says. We'll bring down here anything that's particularly connected with dear Auntie: her portrait by Sargent, of course, though Sargents are fetching immense prices; or the walnut bureau, or the Chippendale chairs or that little worsted rug in her bedroom; but I vote for selling it all, freehold, furniture, everything. As if I couldn't go up to Claridge's now and then, when I want to have a luncheon-party or two of all our friends! And then we shall have no more anxieties, and if they say you must get away from the cold and the damp, we shall know we're doing nothing on the margin of our means. That would be hateful: we mustn't do that.’
‘But you'll never be able to be content with Riseholme again, said Pepino. ‘After your balls and your parties and all that, what will you find to do here?’
Lucia turned her gimlet-eye on him.
‘I shall be a great fool if I don't find something to do,’ she said. ‘Was I so idle and unoccupied before we went to London? Good gracious, I was always worked to death here. Don't you bother your head about that, Pepino, for if you do it will show you don't understand me at all. And our dear Riseholme, let me tell you, has got very slack and inert in our absence, and I feel very guilty about that. There's nothing going on: there's none of the old fizz and bubble and Excelsior there used to be. They're vegetating, they're dry-rotting, and Georgie's getting fat. There's never any news. All that happens is that Daisy slashes a golf-ball about the green for practice in the morning, and then goes down to the links in the afternoon, and positively the only news the next day is whether she has been round under a thousand strokes, whatever that means.’
Lucia gave a little indulgent sigh.
‘Dear Daisy has ideas sometimes,’ she said, ‘and I don't deny that. She had the idea of ouija, she had the idea of the Museum, and though she said that came from Abfou, she had the idea of Abfou. Also she had the idea of golf. But she doesn't carry her ideas out in a vivid manner that excites interest and keeps people on the boil. On the boil! That's what we all ought to be, with a thousand things to do that seem immensely important and which are important because they seem so. You want a certain touch to give importance to things, which dear Daisy hasn't got. Whatever poor Daisy does seems trivial. But they shall see that I've come home. What does it matter to me whether it's Marcia's ball, or playing Alf's accompaniments, or playing golf with Daisy, or playing duets with poor dear Georgie, whose fingers have all become thumbs, so long as I find it thrilling? If I find it all dull, caro, I shall be, as Adele once said, a bloody fool. Dear Adele, she has always that little vein of coarseness.’
Lucia encountered more opposition from Pepino than she anticipated, for he had taken a huge pride in her triumphant summer campaign in London, and though at times he had felt bewildered and buffeted in this high gale of social activity, and had, so to speak, to close his streaming eyes and hold his hat on, he gloried in the incessant and tireless blowing of it, which stripped the choicest fruits from the trees. He thought they could manage, without encroaching on financial margins, to keep the h
ouse open for another year yet, anyhow: he acknowledged that he had been unduly pessimistic about going to Aix, he even alluded to the memories of Aunt Amy which were twined about 25 Brompton Square, and which he would be so sorry to sever. But Lucia, in that talk with his doctor, had made up her mind: she rejected at once the idea of pursuing her victorious career in London if all the time she would have to be careful and thrifty, and if, far more importantly, she would be leaving Pepino down at Riseholme. That was not to be thought of: affection no less than decency made it impossible, and so having made up her mind, she set about the attainment of her object with all her usual energy. She knew, too, the value of incessant attack: smash little Alf, for instance, when he had landed a useful blow in his opponent's face, did not wait for him to recover, but instantly followed it up with another and yet another till his victim collapsed and was counted out. Lucia behaved in precisely the same way with Pepino: she produced rows of figures to show they were living beyond their means; she quoted (or invented) something the Prime Minister had said about the probability of an increase in income-tax; she assumed that they would go to the Riviera for certain, and was appalled at the price of tickets in the Blue Train, and of the tariff at hotels.
‘And with all our friends in London, Pepino,’ she said in the decisive round of these combats, ‘who are longing to come down to Riseholme and spend a week with us, our expenses here will go up. You mustn't forget that. We shall be having a succession of visitors in October, and indeed till we go south. Then there's the meadow at the bottom of the garden: you've not bought that yet, and on that I really have set my heart. A spring garden there. A profusion of daffodils, and a paved walk. You promised me that. I described what it would be like to Tony, and he is wildly jealous. I'm sure I don't wonder. Your new telescope too. I insist on that telescope, and I'm sure I don't know where the money's going to come from. My dear old piano also: it's on its very last legs, and won't last much longer, and I know you don't expect me to live, literally keep alive, without a good piano in the house.’
Pepino was weakening. Even when he was perfectly well and strong he was no match for her, and this rain of blows was visibly staggering him.
‘I don't want to urge you, caro,’ she continued. ‘You know I never urge you to do what you don't feel is best.’
‘But you are urging me,’ said Pepino.
‘Only to do what you feel is best. As for the memories of Aunt Amy in Brompton Square, you must not allow false sentiment to come in. You never saw her there since you were a boy, and if you brought down here her portrait, and the wool-work rug which you remember her putting over her knees, I should say, without urging you, mind, that that was ample… What a sweet morning! Come to the end of the garden and imagine what the meadow will look like with a paved walk and a blaze of daffodils… The Chippendale chairs, I think I should sell.’
Lucia did not really want Aunt Amy's portrait either, for she was aware she had said a good deal from time to time about Aunt Amy's pearls, which were there, a little collar of very little seeds, faultlessly portrayed. But then Georgie had seen them on that night at the opera, and Lucia felt that she knew Riseholme very poorly if it was not perfectly acquainted by now with the nature and minuteness of Aunt Amy's pearls. The pearls had better be sold too, and also, she thought, her own portrait by Sigismund, for the post-cubists were not making much of a mark.
The determining factor in her mind, over this abandonment of her London career, to which in a few days, by incessant battering, she had got Pepino to consent, was Pepino himself. He could not be with her in London, and she could not leave him week after week (for nothing less than that, if you were to make any solid progress in London, was any good) alone in Riseholme. But a large factor, also, was the discovery of how little at present she counted for in Riseholme, and that could not be tolerated. Riseholme had deposed her, Riseholme was not intending to be managed by her from Brompton Square. The throne was vacant, for poor Daisy, and for the matter of that poor Georgie were not the sort of people who could occupy thrones at all. She longed to queen it there again, and though she was aware that her utmost energies would be required, what were energies for except to get you what you wanted?
Just now she was nothing in Riseholme: they had been sorry for her because Pepino had been so ill, but as his steady convalescence proceeded, and she began to ring people up, and pop in, and make plans for them, she became aware that she mattered no more than Piggy and Goosie… There on the green, as she saw from the window of her hall, was Daisy, whirling her arms madly, and hitting a ball with a stick which had a steel blade at the end, and Georgie, she was rather horrified to observe, was there too, trying to do the same. Was Daisy reaping the reward of her persistence, and getting somebody interested in golf? And, good heavens, there were Piggy and Goosie also smacking away. Riseholme was clearly devoting itself to golf.
‘I shall have to take to golf,’ thought Lucia. ‘What a bore! Such a foolish game.’
At this moment a small white ball bounded over her yew-hedge, and tapped smartly against the front-door.
‘What an immense distance to have hit a ball,’ she thought. ‘I wonder which of them did that?’
It was soon clear, for Daisy came tripping through the garden after it, and Lucia, all smiles, went out to meet her.
‘Good morning, dear Daisy,’ she said. ‘Did you hit that ball that immense distance? How wonderful! No harm done at all. But what a splendid player you must be!’
‘So sorry,’ panted Daisy, ‘but I thought I would have a hit with a driver. Very wrong of me; I had no idea it would go so far or so crooked.’
‘A marvellous shot,’ said Lucia. ‘I remember how beautifully you putted. And this is all part of golf too? Do let me see you do it again.’
Daisy could not reproduce that particular masterpiece, but she sent the ball high in the air, or skimming along the ground, and explained that one was a lofted shot, and the other a wind-cheater.
‘I like the wind-cheater best,’ said Lucia. ‘Do let me see if I can do that.’
She missed the ball once or twice, and then made a lovely wind-cheater, only this time Daisy called it a top. Daisy had three clubs, two of which she put down when she used the third, and then forgot about them, so that they had to go back for them… And up came Georgie, who was making wind-cheaters too.
‘Good morning, Lucia,’ he said. ‘It's so tarsome not to be able to hit the ball, but it's great fun if you do. Have you put down your clock-golf yet? There, didn't that go?’
Lucia had forgotten all about the clock-golf. It was somewhere in what was called the ‘game-cupboard’, which contained bowls (as being Elizabethan) and some old tennis rackets, and a cricket bat Pepino had used at school.
‘I'll put it down this afternoon,’ she said. ‘Come in after lunch, Georgie, and play a game with me. You too, Daisy.’
‘Thanks, but Georgie and I were going to have a real round on the links,’ said Daisy, in a rather superior manner.
‘What fun!’ said Lucia sycophantically. ‘I shall walk down and look at you. I think I must learn. I never saw anything so interesting as golf.’
This was gratifying: Daisy was by no means reluctant to show Lucia the way to do anything, but behind that, she was not quite sure whether she liked this sudden interest in golf. Now that practically the whole of Riseholme was taking to it, and she herself could beat them all, having had a good start, she was hoping that Lucia would despise it, and find herself left quite alone on these lovely afternoons. Everybody went down to the little nine-hole course now after lunch, the Vicar (Mr Rushbold) and his wife, the Curate, Colonel Boucher, Georgie, Mrs Antrobus (who discarded her ear-trumpet for these athletics and never could hear you call Fore) and Piggy and Goosie, and often Mrs Boucher was wheeled down in her bath-chair, and applauded the beautiful putts made on the last green. Indeed, Daisy had started instruction classes in her garden, and Riseholme stood in rows and practised swinging and keeping its eye on a particular b
lade of grass: golf in fact promised to make Riseholme busy and happy again just as the establishment of the Museum had done. Of course, if Lucia was wanting to learn (and not learn too much) Daisy would be very happy to instruct her, but at the back of Daisy's mind was a strange uneasiness. She consoled herself, however, by supposing that Lucia would go back to London again in the autumn, and by giving Georgie an awful drubbing.
Lucia did not accompany them far on their round, but turned back to the little shed of a club-house, where she gathered information about the club. It was quite new, having been started only last spring by the tradesmen and townspeople of Riseholme and the neighbouring little town of Button. She then entered into pleasant conversation with the landlord of the Ambermere Arms, who had just finished his round and said how pleased they all were that the gentry had taken to golf.
‘There's Mrs Quantock, ma'am,’ said he. ‘She comes down every afternoon and practises on the green every morning. Walking over the green now of a morning, is to take your life in your hand. Such keenness I never saw, and she'll never be able to hit the ball at all.’
‘Oh, but you mustn't discourage us, Mr Stratton,’ said Lucia. ‘I'm going to devote myself to golf this autumn.’