A Shower of Summer Days Page 18

  “You know,” she turned to him with relief as if they had become two people again, not lovers, not antagonists, but people who could look into each other’s eyes, “I thought so too.”

  “Well, why doesn’t that make a chameleon of you?” He smiled his winner’s smile at her and she smiled back right into his eyes.

  “Because I know now what I want.” She looked down at the house and nodded as if she were making a promise. Then she ran down ahead of him. “I’ll race you!” she called back, knowing that as she ran away from him, forever, she had become again desirable, though it did not matter.

  She really ran away, told him off—“Aunt Violet’s probably in the walled garden”—did not even wait to see what his reaction would be, though she heard him call, “Sally, where are you?” once in the great hall, and then not call again.

  When the coast was clear, she went into the library and stood at the desk. There was something, she felt, waiting to pounce whenever she was inactive now. It was there in the landscape before her, lying there peaceful and self-contained, the indifferent sheep and the indifferent trees. It was alarming and soothing at the same time. It’s because, she thought, I’m on my own now. There is no one. I’m free. In the walled garden, she thought, Violet and Ian are entangled by their feelings, Violet warding him off, Ian trying to get under her armor. It was strange to discover that she did not mind. But just then she saw Charles coming down the road with his long easy stride, and the landscape came alive again and had a human element and this she could not resist. For she had, she realized now, been dreadfully lonely for the last ten minutes. In a second she was out of the door and on the terrace waving. Because she was free, because she was alone, she felt a deep drive towards everyone she loved simply. It was as if she only existed in the presence of others, anything else was still too frightening. She could not wait for Charles on the terrace—she must run to meet him, out of breath, smiling so much from so far off that she felt her mouth crack at the sides.

  “Oh, Charles,” she said with a deep sigh, “oh, there you are.”

  She stood before him smiling and smiling, and he stopped and smiled back.

  “What’s happened?” he asked. “What’s the hurry?”

  “Oh nothing—I saw you—”

  “I’ve been up in the wood with the men.”

  “I know.”

  To be loved, she thought. She thought, safety. Charles saw the look in her eyes, so open, so wide-open and vulnerable, and a week ago this look would have made the blood pound through his body in exultation. A week ago he would have kissed her; he wouldn’t have been able to resist. But Charles too had changed, had grown, had passed into a new phase. It was not so much that he felt old now (he had felt old then when he imagined that he wanted her), but more that he saw her youth and all its implications and was moved by it for itself, as if she were his own child. He put an arm round her shoulder,

  “It’s nearly lunch time. Where are the others?”

  There were no signs of a struggle in the walled garden where the espaliered peaches were just turning a deep rose and the pears, still green, hung in little clusters like enormous grapes. It was rather like being in a huge open greenhouse, so warm and damp was it there, with a haze of bees over the flowers and a deep continual buzz. There were no signs of a struggle. Violet’s gloves, her gardening basket and another flatter one filled with roses, stood in the path. But Ian had had to fight to get her to come and sit down on the bench, and she had only given in because he seemed about to become violent, and what was the use of a scene at this point?

  So she sat, very erect beside him, in a pose so formal that she looked as if someone were taking her photograph. She had, it seemed, set up her whole physical being like a screen. And she did not turn her eyes in Ian’s direction, as she listened.

  “Don’t you see? Can’t you understand?” he was saying “I thought I loved her. Hasn’t that ever happened to you?”

  Violet just inclined her head. Indeed indeed it had happened and she had more than once when she was young imagined that such concentrated attention must be contagious, had thought because she was loved that she must be in love.

  “She used to come on to New York for weekends—she was so eager and darling and so different from all the ambitious self-centered slightly overdeveloped women I knew in the theater, overdeveloped like an overdeveloped film I mean, their personalities so dreadfully underlined. She made everything seem wonderful…”

  “Including you,” Violet said gently.

  “Of course including me. Everything we did was magic—it really was,” he protested, as he saw the shadow of a smile on the aloof beautiful face turned away from him. “You don’t believe me.”

  “Of course I believe you. But then what happened?” Now she turned and looked at him once curiously, intently. “The mirror broke, did it? You couldn’t find your reflection any more? Why not?” Now she was really interested suddenly. “For she hadn’t changed—”

  “I don’t know,” Ian looked off, pressing the palms of his hands together as if he were locking something up inside him. “I don’t know, Violet—it’s too complicated. You see all her letters were full of you. I was jealous at first, a little—then I began to feel curious, then I felt I had to see you myself. Then…” he stopped and looked at her almost humbly, and Violet realized how young he was, with all his airs and graces, how much he needed to be liked, how vulnerable.

  “Then?” But she was smiling now, what he read as an indulgent smile. At last she was listening to him as if he were a real person.

  “Then I found out that innocence is both terrible and boring.” Now he had said it, he was afraid she would be angry.

  Instead Violet sighed. “Yes. The mirror was too honest and too clear and perhaps too deep. It gave you back things you didn’t want to know about yourself, didn’t it?”

  “I do think love is frightening,” Ian said wincing, as if at a blow. “It scares me. I don’t want to be needed that much.”

  “You don’t really want to live, do you, Ian? You want to act. They seem to be quite different things.”

  “But how can I act if I don’t live?” He turned on her almost angrily. “I’ve got to know people, people like you for instance. I’ve got to have a chance to learn,” he said passionately as if he were making love to her.

  “People are hardly objects you can pick up and take to pieces to find out how they tick. You’re dangerous, Ian, you’re a menace,” she said gravely. “What you haven’t learned is that people with your charm are always in debt to life, Ian—we never quite pay it back.” She was unconscious of the change in pronoun. “You can’t use people. It’s too dangerous.”

  “You do make me feel like a cad,” he said ruefully, but she knew as well as he did that as long as he had her attention, nothing she could say now would hurt, even if it did later. He was basking. “I wish I knew more about you and what has made you what you are.” This was a gentler tone, and it surprised Violet into honesty.

  “But I’m nothing,” she sounded dismayed, “nothing at all, Ian. Sally’s fifty times the person I’ll ever be.”

  “Why? I don’t see that. I don’t.”

  “She asks more of life, of herself, of everyone around her than either you or I ever will. She looks at all this,” she said, letting her eyes rest on the trellised banks of sweet peas, “and wants to know what it all means. She never stops asking questions about things as they are in themselves. There’s a deep realistic root to her romanticism and that gives it validity. I have great respect for Sally,” she ended.

  “So I gather.” Ian was perhaps ashamed. But Violet seemed to have forgotten him. “All my life I’ve felt guilty,” she said suddenly.

  The last thing she had expected was to find herself confiding in Ian, but now she had begun, the moment held her and she must go on. Perhaps it was that Ian would be leaving and never come back, so she would not be called to account for what she said. Perhaps it was that she had truly
recognized her buried self in him, herself as she might have been if she had not married Charles who had forced her both by his strength and his weakness to grow and to endure and to understand because she really loved him. “Don’t you see that it’s a frightful thing you’ve done to me—all this? That it’s brought back all the old guilt, the repeated pattern. I can’t believe quite that I’m responsible for what has happened between you and Sally, but it has happened before so it frightens me—not through my will, Ian, believe me…”

  “I do believe you,” he said quietly. “I’m terribly sorry, Violet. Can you, will you ever forgive me?”

  “Don’t be a fool,” she said harshly. “It’s myself I can’t forgive.”

  “I don’t see why. It’s not your fault if you weave a spell, if people have to love you.”

  “Yes,” Violet answered in a low voice, “it is my fault. In my heart of hearts, I suppose I want to be loved. You only call out of people what you want to call out. It doesn’t just happen. That’s the guilt,” she said, putting one hand on his. “And now,” she said, getting up, as if this small gesture had been too much. “It’s time we found Charles and Sally. It’s time,” she said with a delightful cool smile, “that we rejoined the innocents.”

  Ian for once was speechless. He felt as if too much had been given him all at once, but he was darned if he knew quite what it was.

  Charles and Sally were waiting for them on the terrace, Charles relaxed in his usual rattan chair, Sally as usual hunched up on a cushion on the steps. They looked peaceful and solid, so that for a second Violet had the sensation that she and Ian were immaterial, were ghosts. Then Sally raised her head. There was too much pain, open and alive, in her face. It struck Violet a hard hurting blow, so hard she stopped where she was.

  “Hello there, have we been gone long?” as if indeed she and Ian had been gone hours instead of a half-hour at most.

  “Have your ears been burning?” Ian asked Sally, running up the steps quickly, eagerly as if he were bringing a present.

  She did not look at him. She just shook her head, a slow deep blush mounting through her neck.

  “We’ve been talking about you, haven’t we, Violet?”

  He turned to find the Violet he had just met in the garden, but she was no longer there. What he met was a cold refusing glance. In the second of silence that followed his question, as it lay there unanswered, he may have felt some final parting taking place. He was now absolutely outside the group. They would stay on here. But in a few hours he would be halfway up the sky, moving faster than time to the other side of the world. He sat down beside Sally on the step, his arms hugging his knees. How long was this pause in which the kaleidoscope of feeling would one last time be shaken and take its pattern? None of them could have measured it in seconds or minutes.

  But in it Violet slowly climbed the steps and sat down in her round-backed sheltering chair, and looked over at Charles and found his eyes and rested there a second, answering all his questions in a single look. No, she said to him, it is not what you and Sally think, not that at all. It is something else, her look told him. It told him, what matters, what always matters above all is us, Charles.

  In it Sally slowly lifted her head and caught Violet’s exchange, the silent exchange of understanding with her husband. It was as if she had been holding her breath under water and at last could come up for air. The wild revolving pieces of life were settling again into a pattern, and she sighed.

  “What did you say about me?” she asked Violet, ignoring Ian completely.

  This was the fourth question that had lain on the air but this time Violet laughed her charmed, her slightly theatrical laugh and said, “Darling, if we told you we’d turn your head and that would be a pity, wouldn’t it, Charles?”

  Charles grunted a noncommittal answer. Then got up, yawned and stretched like a large comfortable cat, Violet thought, and said, “It’s about time we had a drink.”

  While he was gone, Sally came out with something she had had on her mind all morning.

  “Ian,” she said tentatively, shyly, “would you mind very much if I didn’t come to the airport with you? It’s going to be so awful”—she stopped and swallowed—“I mean, I think I’d rather be here when you really go.”

  “Whatever you wish, Sally.” Ian did seem to mind, and he didn’t look at her.

  “You always have to go on saying good-bye after it’s already happened. You have to stand around…” Sally said, trying to explain, looking up at her aunt for confirmation.

  “You’re absolutely right, Sally. Charles and Ian can just tootle off by themselves and we’ll stay here.”

  “No,” Sally said firmly, “you go with them, Aunt Violet Please do. Then Charles won’t be lonely driving back, and…” but she did not finish her sentence. What she really wanted was to be here with the house alone.

  “All right, darling, whatever you say…” For the least I can do, thought Violet, is this one small thing I have no wish to do.

  “I feel so queer,” Ian said suddenly. “I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

  “Nothing a drink won’t cure,” Charles came clattering and clinking through the door. It was true that the drinks made a tremendous difference. The edges which had been so sharp blurred a little and conversation which kept edging up to a point, to a question and then stopping short, now flowed with something like ease. Ian, in a last spurt, threw himself into the telling of various stories and Violet laughed almost continuously so there was an unbroken murmur around them. Sally felt she was floating a little above and beyond everything, a strangely peaceful place in which Charles, Ian and Violet seemed almost equally beautiful and she herself did not have to exist except to appreciate and glory in their beauty, not for herself, but for itself.

  There was not a breath of wind so the trees looked, for once, perfectly still and at peace. The sheep had found shade and lay, close together, somnolent in the oak grove, giving an occasional querulous baa, then chewing their cuds as if the question had been answered.

  “All my questions are answered except one,” Sally said, getting up for the first time and standing very tall and straight. She was not looking at Violet or Charles or Ian. She was looking up at the house, at the tall open windows, at the formidable stone height over her head. She was asking her question of the house, so they all felt. “What is wrong with our lives?” she asked the house, half-smiling, and then quickly and piercingly glanced down at her aunt.

  Violet was startled into an answer before she knew it. “Only very simple things,” she said quietly, “like youth and age, innocence and sophistication, poverty and riches—”

  “What axe you talking about, Violet?” Charles said crossly. “The only thing that’s wrong with my life is that I’m getting old,” he said savagely.

  “That’s what I said,” Violet murmured, “youth, age—”

  “It isn’t an answer,” Sally said disdainfully. “It’s an evasion.”

  But Ian was interested. “You mean,” he asked Violet, “you learn the things too late. When you’ve had your life you know about it, is that it?”

  “The house,” Sally said, still standing absorbed in her contemplation, “means something else. It accuses us. I felt it the first time I ever came here—when I fell up the stairs. I wonder,” she added half to herself, “if I’ll ever make my peace with the house.”

  “You know, Violet,” Charles said leaning forward, “this morning for the first time almost since we got here, I woke up and it felt like home. Now why is that?” he asked, turning the glass in his hand.

  “Because you’re making it,” Sally said quickly, “you’re inside. When I’m really inside something, I’ll begin—I’ll be—” she stammered. “Oh, how I hate college where no one is ever inside anything real!”

  Maire opened the glass door and stuck her head out, “It’s on the table,” she said, blushing, “lunch,” she said as if they might imagine it was tea or dinner.

  “By
Jove, yes,” Charles looked at his watch. “It’s time we fed, Violet, if we’re not to have to hurry.”

  “But just stay a moment, just a second,” Sally cried out, as if it really mattered. And, startled into obedience, Charles sat down again. “I just want to look at you a second, forever,” she said gravely. She looked at them one by one, Charles smiling at her, indulgent, puzzled, Ian quite still as if his picture were being taken, and Violet staring off at the sheep as if she had not heard and were just waiting passively for the moment to rise and go in. “There,” Sally said, “you can move now.”

  In that instant they seemed to her unutterably dear and beautiful, but also about to vanish. They seemed like ghosts of themselves, attended by other ghosts, her father riding up, her great-grandmother and all the others, the great procession of Denes. They are all shadows, the house is substance, she thought, but now she was being pulled along by Charles, who was laughing, telling her she looked as if she had seen a ghost.

  At the last moment Sally almost decided to go with them, as Ian’s dark leather bag was lifted into the back, as he ran up the stairs to put a pound in Maire’s hand, as he then turned, hesitated, might perhaps have kissed her but she luckily put out her hand and shook his quickly and could not say a word. Charles and Violet were already in the car.

  “Well,” he said. He said, “Sally—”

  “Just go,” Sally heard herself saying. “Don’t try to say anything,” and then as he turned away, she added, “Have a good flight!”

  Before she knew what had happened the little black car had disappeared and she was left with one arm up, still waving but waving now at the trees, at the sheep, waving into space, alone like a mad person. She let her hand fall and stood there and then turned to go in, giving one searching glance at the wall of windows, at the stone height above her, a measuring glance which asked, “Can I do it?” almost as if she were about to scale them, and not as she did do, merely go into the house alone.