'Even then, my dear, I wondered a little. It seemed to me that there was something a little gentlemanly about your painting. You must remember I am not English; I cannot understand this keen zest to be well-bred. English snobbery is more macabre to me even than English morals. However, I said, "Charles has done something delicious. What will he do next?"
'The next thing I saw was your very handsome volume "Village and Provincial Architecture", was it called? Quite a tome, my dear, and what did I find? Charm again. "Not quite my cup of tea," I thought; "this is too English." I have the fancy for rather spicy things, you know, not for the shade of the cedar tree, the cucumber sandwich, the silver cream-jug, the English girl dressed in whatever English girls do wear for tennis - not that, not Jane Austen, not M-m-miss M-m-mitford. Then, to be frank, dear Charles, I despaired of you. "I am a degenerate old d-d-dago," I said "and Charles - I speak of your art, my dear - is a dean's daughter in flowered muslin."
'Imagine then my excitement at luncheon today. Everyone was talking about you. My hostess was a friend of my mother's, a Mrs Stuyvesant Oglander; a friend of yours, too, my dear. Such a frump! Not at all the society I imagined you to keep. However, they, had all been to your exhibition, but it was you they talked of, how you had broke away, my dear, gone to the tropics, become a Gauguin, a Rimbaud. You can imagine how my old heart leaped.
' "Poor Celia," they said, "after all she's done for him." "He owes everything to her. It's too bad." "And with Julia," they said, "after the way she behaved in America." "Just as she was going back to Rex."
' "But the pictures," I said; "Tell me about them."
'Oh, the pictures," they said; "they're most peculiar." "Not at all what he usually does." "Very forceful." "Quite barbaric." "I call them downright unhealthy," said Mrs Stuyvesant Oglander.
'My dear, I could hardly keep still in my chair. I wanted to dash out of the house and leap in a taxi and say, "Take me to Charles's unhealthy pictures." Well, I went, but the gallery after luncheon was so full of absurd women in the sort of hats they should be made to eat, that I rested a little - I rested here with Cyril and Tom and these saucy boys. Then I came back at the unfashionable time of five o'clock, all agog, my dear; and what did I find? I found, my dear, a very naughty and very successful practical joke. It reminded me of dear Sebastian when he liked so much to dress up in false whiskers. It was charm again, my dear, simple, creamy English charm, playing tigers.'
'You're-quite right,' I said.
'My dear, of course I'm right. I was right years ago - more years, I am happy to say, than either of us shows - when I warned you. I took you out to dinner to warn you of charm. I warned you expressly and in great detail of the Flyte family. Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.'
The youth called Tom approached us again. 'Don't be a tease, Toni; buy me a drink.' I remembered my train and left Anthony with him.
As I stood on the platform by the restaurant-car I saw my luggage and Julia's go past with Julia's sour-faced maid strutting beside the porter. They had begun shutting the carriage doors when Julia arrived, unhurried, and took her place in front of me. I had a table for two. This was a very convenient train; there was half an hour before, dinner and half and hour after it; then, instead of changing to the branch line, as had been the rule in Lady Marchmain's day, we were met at the junction. It was night as we drew out of Paddington, and the glow of the town gave place first to the scattered lights of the suburbs, then to the darkness of the fields.
'It seems days since I saw you,' I said.
'Six hours; and we were together all yesterday. You look worn out.'
'It's been a day of nightmare - crowds, critics, the Clarences, a luncheon party at Margot's, ending up with half an hour's well-reasoned abuse of my pictures in a pansy bar...I think Celia knows about us.'
'Well, she had to know some time.'
'Everyone seems to know. My pansy friend had not been in London twenty-four hours before he'd heard.'
'Damn everybody.'
'What about Rex?'
'Rex isn't anybody at all,' said Julia; 'he just doesn't exist.' The knives and forks jingled on the table as we sped through the darkness; the little- circle of gin and vermouth in the glasses lengthened to oval, contracted again, with the sway of the carriage, touched the lip, lapped back again, never spilt; I was leaving the day behind me. Julia pulled off her hat and tossed it into the rack above her, and shook her night-dark hair with a little sigh of ease - a sigh fit for the pillow, the sinking firelight, and a bedroom window open to the stars and the whisper of bare trees.
'It's great to have you back, Charles; like the old days.'
'Like the old days?' I thought.
Rex, in his early forties, had grown heavy and ruddy; he had lost his Canadian accent and acquired instead the hoarse, loud tone that was common to all his friends, as though their voices were perpetually strained to make themselves heard above a crowd, as though, with youth forsaking them, there was no time to wait the opportunity to speak, no time to listen, no time to reply; time for a laugh - a throaty mirthless laugh, the base currency of goodwill.
There were half a dozen of these friends in the Tapestry Hall: politicians; 'young Conservatives' in the early forties, with sparse hair and high blood-pressure; a Socialist from the coal-mines who had already caught their clear accents, whose cigars came to pieces on his lips, whose hand shook when he poured himself out a drink; a financier older than the rest, and, one might guess from the way they treated him, richer; a love-sick columnist, who alone was silent, gloating sombrely on the only woman of the party; a woman they called 'Grizel', a knowing rake whom, in their hearts, they all feared a little.
They all feared Julia, too, Grizel included. She greeted them and apologized for not being there to welcome them, with a formality which hushed there for a minute; then she came and sat with me near the fire, and the storm of talk arose once more and whirled about our ears.
'Of course, he can marry her and make her queen tomorrow.'
'We had our chance in October. Why didn't we send the Italian fleet to the bottom of Mare Nostrum? Why didn't we blow Spezia to blazes? Why didn't we land on Pantelleria?'
'Franco's simply a German agent. They tried to put him in to prepare air bases to bomb France. That bluff has been called, anyway.'
'It would make the monarchy stronger than it's been since Tudor times. The people are with him.'
'The Press are with him.'
'I'm with him.'
'Who cares about divorce now except a few old maids who aren't married, anyway?'
'If he has a show-down with the old gang, they'll just disappear like, like...'
'Why didn't we close the canal? Why didn't we bomb Rome?'
'It wouldn't have been necessary. One firm note...'
'One firm speech.'
'One show-down.'
'Anyway, Franco will soon be skipping back to Morocco. Chap I saw today just come from Barcelona...'
'...Chap just come from Fort Belvedere...'
'...Chap just come from the Palazzo Venezia... '
'All we want is a show-down.'
'A show-down with Baldwin.'
'A show-down with Hitler.'
'A show-down with the Old Gang.'
'...That I should live to see my country, the land of Clive and Nelson...'
'...My country of Hawkins and Drake.'
'...My country of Palmerston... '
'Would you very much mind not doing that?' said Grizel to the columnist, who had been attempting in a maudlin manner to twist her wrist; 'I don't happen to enjoy it.'
'I wonder which is the more horrible,' I said, 'Celia's Art and Fashion or Rex's Politics and Money.'
'Why worry about them?'
'Oh, my darling, why is it that love makes me hate the world? It's supposed to have quite the opposite effect. I feel as though all mankind, and God, too, were in a conspiracy against us.'
'They are, they are.'
'But we've got our happiness in spite of them; here and now, we've taken possession of it. They can't hurt us, can they?'
'Not tonight; not now.'
'Not for how many nights?'
[3]
'Do you remember, said Julia, in the tranquil, lime-scented evening, 'do you remember the storm?'
'The bronze doors banging.'
'The roses in cellophane.'
'The man who gave the "get-together" party and was never seen again.'
'Do you remember how the sun came out on our last evening just as it has done today?'
It had been an afternoon of low cloud and summer squalls, so overcast that at times I had stopped work and roused Julia from the light trance in which she sat - she had sat so often; I never tired of painting her, forever finding in her new wealth and delicacy - until at length we had gone early to our baths and, on coming down, dressed for dinner, in the last half-hour of the day, we found the world transformed; the sun had emerged; the wind had fallen to a soft breeze which gently stirred the blossom in the limes and carried its fragrance, fresh from the late rains, to merge with the sweet breath of box and the drying stone. The shadow of the obelisk spanned the terrace.
I had carried two garden cushions from the shelter of the colonnade and put them on the rim of the fountain. There Julia sat, in a tight little gold tunic and a white gown, one hand in the water idly turning an emerald ring to catch the fire of the sunset; the carved animals mounted over her dark head in a cumulus of green moss and glowing stone and dense shadow, and the waters round them flashed and bubbled and broke into scattered flames.
'...So much to remember,' she said. 'How many days have there been since then, when we haven't seen each other; a hundred, do you think?'
'Not so many.'
'Two Christmases' - those bleak, annual excursions into propriety. Boughton, home of my family, home of my cousin Jasper, with what glum memories of childhood I revisited its pitch-pine corridors and dripping walls! How querulously my father and I, seated side by side in my uncle's Humber, approached the avenue of Wellingtonias knowing that at the end of the drive we should find my uncle, my aunt, my Aunt Phillippa, my cousin Jasper, and, of recent years, Jasper's wife and children; and besides them, perhaps already arrived, perhaps every moment expected, my wife and my children. This annual sacrifice united us; here among the holly and mistletoe and the cut spruce, the parlour game's ritually performed, the brandy-butter and the Carlsbad plums, the village choir in the pitch-pine minstrels' gallery, gold twine and sprigged wrapping-paper, she and I were accepted, whatever ugly rumours had been afloat in tile past year, as man and wife. 'We must keep it up, whatever it costs us, for the sake of the children my wife said.
'Yes, two Christmases...And the three days, of good taste before I followed you to Capri.'
'Our first summer.'
'Do you remember how I hung about Naples, then followed, how we met by arrangement on the hill path and how flat it fell?'
'I went back to the villa and said, "Papa, who do you think has arrived at the hotel?" and he said, "Charles Ryder, I suppose." I said, "Why did you think of him?" and papa replied, "Cara came back from Paris with the news that you and he were inseparable. He seems to have a penchant for my children. However, bring him here; I think we have the room."
'There was the time you had jaundice and wouldn't let me see you.'
'And when I had flu and you were afraid to come.'
'Countless visits to Rex's constituency.'
'And Coronation Week, when you ran away from London. Your goodwill mission to your father-in-law. The time you went to Oxford to paint the picture they didn't like. Oh, yes, quite a hundred days.'
'A hundred days wasted out of two years and a bit...not a day's coldness or mistrust or disappointment.'
'Never that.'
We fell silent; only the birds spoke in a multitude of small, clear voices in the lime-trees; only the waters spoke among their carved stones.
Julia took the handkerchief from my breast pocket and dried her hand; then lit a cigarette. I feared to break the spell of memories, but for once our thoughts had not kept pace together, for when at length Julia spoke, she said sadly: 'How many more? Another hundred?'
'A lifetime.'
'I want to marry you, Charles.'
'One day; why now?'
'War,' she said, 'this year, next year, sometime soon. I want a day or two with you of real peace.'
'Isn't this peace?'
The sun had sunk now to the line of woodland beyond the valley; all the opposing slope was already in twilight, but the lakes below us were aflame; the light grew in strength and splendour as it neared death, drawing long shadows across the pasture, falling full on the rich stone spaces of the house, firing the panes in the windows, glowing on cornices and colonnade and dome, spreading out all the stacked merchandise of colour and scent from earth and stone and leaf, glorifying the head and golden shoulders of the woman beside me.
'What do you mean by "peace", if not this?'
'So much more'; and then in a chill, matter-of-fact tone she continued: 'Marriage isn't a thing we can take when the impulse moves us. There must be a divorce - two divorces. We must make plans.'
