The Flowering Thorn Page 19

  The sentence was never finished, but Lesley understood. And suddenly another memory of Natasha rose up out of the past.…

  ‘Women are just like cats,’ thought Lesley to herself, ‘no sooner do they find a good place than they want to have a baby in it.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  That same evening, after the Locks had gone, she at last made the acquaintance of Denis Cotton. Sir Philip had asked him to play bridge, with Mr. Pomfret for a fourth; and arriving rather late Lesley found them all three on the terrace watching a clear green sky.

  “Sit down and look at that, my dear,” said Sir Philip, pulling up a fourth chair. “There’s a star just over the cypress, a little to the right. Got it?”

  Lesley stood and stared. The colour of grapes, the colour of shallow water, the colour of jade hollowed into a dish! And watching her astonished eyes, Sir Philip suddenly threw up his hands.

  The Vicar laughed.

  “Yes,” he said, “Lesley’s a proper country-woman. She never notices the landscape, only the weather.”

  “Miss Frewen’s a part of the landscape,” muttered Denis Cotton; and then flushed suddenly crimson, as though in readiness to be laughed at.

  But unfortunately neither the Vicar nor his host paid him any attention. They were both looking at Lesley, as she stood with her head thrown back and her body motionless: in a dress of honey-coloured silk that held all the last of the light: with her sun-burned throat and line of white shoulder.

  Then the green faded from the sky, the yellow from her gown; and behind them in the lighted house a gong rang for dinner.

  2

  It is a commonplace of natural history that young men cramming at country vicarages always fall in love. To this rule Denis Cotton was no exception, and during the course of the following week—as soon, that is to say, as relations between the Vicarage and the cottage had resumed their natural flow—he paid tribute to convention and fell in love with Lesley. He did it so thoroughly, moreover, that the passage of one week more found him dogging her footsteps with the persistence of a detective and the expression of a spaniel. Whenever she mentioned a new book someone always sent it to him (a belated birthday present) by the next post from Town. He was exhibiting, in fact, every symptom of a classic case, and both the Vicar and Sir Philip were making a grievance of it.

  “It’s all very well, my dear,” said Mr. Pomfret, “but I’m being paid to teach the young ass Turkish. If he gives his whole mind to it we may get as far as the pronouns: with the present one-third in action we’d better give up the Consular and try for Pitman’s.”

  Sir Philip’s attitude was even simpler: with the arrival of Denis he had at last been able to make up a bridge four, and now, after only two sessions, all was rapidly being marred by the young man’s palpable inability to keep his mind on his cards.

  “If he plays with you he can see your eyes, if he plays against you he can see your profile. I can’t think of anything,” said Sir Philip glumly.

  Lesley put down her cup—they were taking tea together in the library—and sighed. It was all perfectly true, and the young man was swiftly becoming a perfect nuisance: but short of deliberate brutality there seemed to be no mode of behaviour from which he could not draw encouragement.

  ‘And I can’t be brutal,’ she thought, ‘it would be like being brutal to Pat.’ And she sighed again, for, as was perhaps only natural, she herself saw Denis’s case a good deal more sympathetically than either of the men. Young Cotton, however egregious in behaviour, was being badly hurt; and with the fellow-feeling of youth Lesley slightly resented Sir Philip’s flippancy. To change the subject, therefore, she said idly,

  “Pat had Ellen again last night. Do you know that’s three times running?”

  They both laughed; for the care of Pat, on the extremely frequent occasions when Lesley dined at the Hall, now devolved on one or other of the Hall maids, and the volunteers for this duty were so remarkably persistent that she was never much surprised to discover, on the following morning, a trace here and there of yokel-sized boots.

  Sir Philip sighed.

  “They use it, I fear, as what is technically known as a Love Nest; and short of calling for a second volunteer to chaperon the first, I can’t see any way of stopping it. You don’t really mind, do you?”

  “Not in the least,” said Lesley, “so long as they’ll hear if Pat’s being kidnapped and fish him out if there’s a fire.”

  “Oh, they’ll do that all right,” Sir Philip assured her. “In fact, in either of the cases you mention, two pairs of hands would probably be far more useful than one. My under-gardener, for example—he was probably there last night—would deal with any number of kidnappers.”

  Lesley sat thoughtful a moment.

  “It’s so funny,” she said slowly, “to realise that this time next year he’ll be on the verge of school. Dear me!”

  Sir Philip looked at her.

  “Relief, or regret?”

  “I don’t really know. Both, perhaps. But the odd thing,” said Lesley thoughtfully, “is that what relief there is isn’t nearly so—so thorough as I expected it would be. In fact, it seems horribly likely that I’m going to go on feeling responsible for him.”

  “It’s a very good school,” said Sir Philip.

  “I know. But if I don’t think he gets enough to eat I shall quite probably write to the Head. And then Pat will find out and loathe me ever after.…”

  They laughed together, but Lesley was serious.

  “That’s all very well, but at the moment he’s quite fond of me. And it’s not good for the young to be suddenly disillusioned.”

  Sir Philip smiled.

  “You needn’t worry about that, my dear. Pat will never stop being fond of you.”

  “Why not? It’s very natural.”

  “Because you don’t try to possess him,” said Sir Philip with sudden energy. “You don’t want to. You don’t love him enough. He’ll never have to bother about whether you’re really going to commit suicide or are only bluffing him. He’ll never have to go round the house removing ornamental weapons. And the older he grows the more grateful he’ll be.”

  From where she sat Lesley could see the great glowing Sargent on the opposite wall. Superb! She said,

  “You make love very … undignifying.”

  “Possessive love, yes. They say women can stomach it sometimes, but I know no man can. He just wants to bolt. And daren’t, for fear of the consequences. My God!”

  Lesley kept her eyes on the picture. The words were bitter: did he wish them unspoken, he might imagine them unheard. She thought: ‘I’ve known him now nearly four years, and in all that time he’s never once mentioned his wife. Surely he hasn’t forgotten her altogether!’ There were no children, of course; no kinsfolk, hardly, for the War had played havoc with the succeeding generation; the name would die out and the Hall itself go to some remote middle-aged connection whom Sir Philip had ferreted out on his return from Greece. He was a man named Brooke, at that time in the Navy, and the nephew, by a first marriage, of a cousin of Lady Kerr’s. The connection was thus extremely distant—so distant, in fact, that Charles Brooke himself was probably not aware of it, and Sir Philip, after thus having satisfied the deep-rooted instinct to leave property in the family, had resolutely refused either to make his heir’s acquaintance or to have him informed. The lad (for so, during fifteen years, Sir Philip had continued to think of him) would only go on borrowing on post-obits; for the rest, he was presumably a gentleman, had a wife and two boys, and could count his chickens at leisure as soon as they were hatched.…

  “… And if he isn’t grateful, he ought to be,” said Sir Philip.

  With a start Lesley recollected herself. It was not Charles Brooke they were talking of, it was Patrick.…

  “… No,” she said slowly, as though that had been her thought too; “no I don’t adore him. I’m not even sure that I love him. I’m not a bit maternal, really.”

  Sir Phili
p looked at her thoughtfully.

  “You know, it’s a curious thing, but I believe that’s true. That good woman, Mrs. Pomfret, for instance, keeps saying how you’ve devoted yourself to him: but she isn’t right. You’ve devoted yourself much more to me. You’ve devoted yourself to the cottage, and quite a good deal to her own Henry. And as a result of all this non-devotion you’ve brought Pat up damned well.” The faunish yellow eyes were suddenly steady. “A child should be—how can I put it?—not too much concentrated on. That’s the real advantage of a large family. An only child supporting the whole weight of the mother’s emotions—and sometimes the father’s as well—he leads the most exhausting life on earth. It’s what might very well have happened to Pat, if you’d been another kind of woman. My dear Lesley—you know all this better than I do, of course—a child doesn’t want to absorb a life, he wants to inhabit one. Make a happy life for him to inhabit, and you make your child happy too.—I’ve never tried it myself,” admitted Sir Philip, “but that’s the theory.”

  ‘And you had it all ready for them!’ thought Lesley. She got up from her chair and walked over to the window. It was an abrupt breaking-off; but if she would hide her compassion, what else was there to do?

  3

  Walking pensively home, she encountered Denis Cotton.

  “By the way,” he said carelessly, “weren’t you saying you liked truffles? My aunt’s just sent me a box on her way through Town.…”

  Lesley gazed at it hopelessly. How impossible he was, how touching; above all, what a nuisance! And with a shiver of dismay she felt stir within her something that might very well develop (only she sincerely hoped it wouldn’t) into the uneasy emotion of feeling responsible for him too.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  About five nights later her instinct was confirmed.

  It was warm but showery, and Patrick having been put to bed, Lesley settled down to one of her rare evenings alone at the cottage. She was knitting a cream and dark-blue sweater (design by Chanel) from printed instructions, and though now reasonably expert felt the need for concentration. The fact that eight ounces of wool cost no more than five shillings, whereas the finished article (at any rate as worn by herself) cost three to four guineas, had been one of the outstanding discoveries of the previous year. With extreme perseverance, she learnt first to knit, then to knit well; and as a consequence was habitually to be seen about the orchard in the last word of woollen elegance. The one at present in hand had broad diagonal stripes and a stitch like string gloves, and with a cream tailored skirt—she still got skirts from Bradley’s—would probably be unrivalled even in the by no means unmodish county of Bucks.

  So for two hours Lesley knitted steadily on, with no more accompaniment than the click of her needles; and at the end of that time reaching a certain previously-fixed point, folded wool and needles together and lit a cigarette. It had long stopped raining: the night was warm, for she had let the fire out, and with possibly a moon above the apple-tree, if she cared to go and look for it. But Lesley smoked her cigarette and stayed where she was: a proper countrywoman! It was twenty past ten, and already quiet as midnight: when the cuckoo cried the half she would dout lights and go to bed. And suddenly, in that perfect stillness, her ear was caught by the faintest possible sound from the path under the window. It was a tiny dull jar—no more than that: as though someone in rubber shoes, moving cautiously up the path, had knocked against the iron scraper. Lesley held her breath.

  There was someone outside.

  There was someone outside the window, trying to see in. How she knew she could not have told; unless a will to enter, a yearning to see, could be stronger to penetrate than walls to exclude.

  “Who is there?” said Lesley.

  But her voice scarcely carried the length of the room: of course there was no answer. She thought, ‘If I wait another moment, I shall be too frightened to move.’ And suppressing the first prescient tremor, she got up and opened the door. It was Denis Cotton, not daring to knock.

  For an instant they stood motionless, ridiculously staring. Then she put up her cigarette again and drew a long breath.

  “Don’t be angry with me.”

  His voice disarmed her. It was husky, low, beaten. Instead of rating him, she said,

  “I thought you were burglars. I’ve been shivering with fright.”

  Instantly his whole being was a vessel of contrition. He loathed, he cursed himself; he wanted to die for having alarmed her. The usual sunburn no longer coloured his cheek: health, strength and life seemed to be visibly departing. And Lesley, who had once or twice observed the same phenomenon in Pat, sat down by the hearth again and asked for another cigarette.

  He gave it to her with a slight return to normality; took one himself and burned his fingers with the match. Carefully avoiding all reference to the object of his visit, Lesley asked if he would like coffee.

  He shook his head. He had not again spoken. But speech was rising within him, and an instinctive desire for tranquillity prompted Lesley to get in first. She began to talk about Pat, about Pincher, about her plans for the garden: related, with a wealth of amusing detail, the latest sally of Mr. Povey’s and his repulse by Mrs. Sprigg. When she had finished, Denis told her that he loved her.

  He told her extremely badly. With a naïve astonishment, as though at something rare and strange, he described the classic symptoms. He thought of her constantly, and was unable to sleep: revolted from all customary occupation, and had discovered new beauties in the works of the poets. In the silence of the room, in the greater silence of the night, the words fell now one by one, now in a sudden burst, but always with the same inevitability. In his longer pauses, Lesley could have prompted him. She could have prompted him—twenty-one and romantic—even to the end, when he employed the last cliché of all to ask her to marry him.

  With the strangest mixture of emotions—pity and affection, a touch of amusement—Lesley sat and looked at him. ‘How young!’ she thought. ‘How charming! How young and charming, and what a nuisance!’

  “Say something, Lesley.”

  She said the only thing that seemed at all apposite.

  “My dear—I was thirty-one last birthday.”

  He regarded her with ingenuous surprise. He had been telling himself, thought Lesley, that she was perhaps twenty-five.… She followed up her advantage.

  “So you see how absurd it would be. You’ve made me very proud, my dear”—he hadn’t really, of course, because given the circumstances his falling in love with her was practically inevitable; but she lied out of kindness—“and I hate you to be unhappy.” She looked at him again: he was miserable! And as though to show how seriously she was taking him, Lesley frowned hard, wrinkling her brow into unaccustomed lines. “Absurd!” she repeated severely.

  “Tragic.”

  She accepted the correction.

  “But only from your point of view, you understand. Not from mine. I should simply hate to be twenty again, or even twenty-five. One has a good time, of course, but it’s still the good time of a children’s party. Lots of ice-cream méringues, and a bilious attack afterwards.”

  He wasn’t listening to her. He was watching the movement of her lips. When they were still again, he became conscious of a silence.

  “Lesley.”

  She looked at him kindly. The next moment he was on his knees at her side, his face buried in her lap.

  2

  Just as she would have done for Pat, she smoothed back his thick short hair and promised that he would soon be better. She told him a beautiful fairy tale about the glories of the Levant Consular Service. She invented an uncle, an uncle in the Foreign Office, who had always maintained that of all Government services the Levant Consular was the most important. She drew a rapid word-picture of Athens and the Golden Horn, lavishing roses and marble against an azure sea.…

  The head in her lap stirred convulsively.

  “Don’t.”

  Lesley broke off. But her fingers
continued to move, and under them the head stirred again.

  “Don’t you know that anything beautiful always makes me want you more?” He looked up: his face, no more than six inches from her own, was twisted with distress. “Even here, seeing you every day, I can only just manage. As soon as I wake up, I think, ‘When shall I see her?’ And until I do see you I feel as if—as if I hadn’t had any breakfast.” The words were coming more easily, so fast indeed that once or twice he stumbled and mis-pronounced: attitude and all, he might have been at prayer.…

  “Lesley, darling, you—you don’t know how beautiful you are. Beautiful and good, and everything you say.… With Pat and in the orchard … always with your head bare.… Your lovely hair.… When you say that about being older, you don’t know how silly it sounds. I—I want you so much I can’t sleep.”

  A deep compassion troubled her heart. She said gently,

  “My dear, I can only tell you what you won’t believe.”

  “That I’ll get over it when I go away?”

  “Yes. Or … even without going away … if you stay long enough.”

  “The last part … is what you don’t believe,” said Denis slowly.

  And suddenly, with denial on her lips, she could not utter it. For deep in her being, in her body and in her heart and in her subtle brain, she knew that if she wanted him, he was hers to have.

  But she didn’t want him, poor Denis!

  She thought, ‘I must be careful. To him this is all real and terrible.’ And like some expert craftsman before an important and delicate piece of work, she gathered all her resources of skill and experience.

  She thought, ‘I must not belittle myself. Before the ultimate virtues (which he obviously believes me to possess) one may bow down and worship without loss of self-respect. And as for beauty—since, after these two months we shall never meet again, it is perfectly possible that he may die happy in the belief that I resembled Lady Hamilton. And to have loved and lost, in early youth, a mixture of Lady Hamilton and Florence Nightingale—that is no misfortune for any man.’ The conjunction of these names did not intimidate her: for the boy was in love. ‘I must be very good, and very beautiful,’ thought Lesley quite calmly; ‘and then however hard it is now, there will be no bitterness afterwards.”