Читать книгу The Joyful Delaneys - Hugh Walpole - Страница 8

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Meg Delaney’s nature was often childlike and even childish. Indeed, as I have already said, the Delaneys were on occasion childish and were sometimes patronized by persons who considered themselves more mature.

Meg herself was never aware of being patronized; too many things were always happening for her to notice patronage. Certain people alarmed her a little, like a friend of Kitty’s called Joe Cardinal who wrote for the paper Life and Leisure—a journal owned, edited and written for by ladies who despised men and womenly women—but then Meg was always alarmed by writers. When Joe Cardinal came to a meal in Charles Street, Meg talked a little too much, laughed a little too gaily and agreed rather too eagerly that popular writers like Messrs. Adrian and Rose were too awful for words; not that she had ever read them. She didn’t read books, partly because there seemed no time, but also because, as soon as she began to read, things, people, memories, flashes of sun, a cry, a whirr of the clock, the colour of a flower, a stiffness in the leg, a laugh, a bell would break in. She was a little of a coward with all women who did things for a living, because she thought they must despise her who did nothing at all. Also there was no doubt but that as soon as a woman did something for a living she was changed a little. Something was added to her personality, something detracted from it. Add two waistcoat-buttons, subtract one blush of the cheek. Meg, like her daughter, was preoccupied almost entirely with individuals. She saw the world as peopled with individuals and therefore she could never understand politics or world causes. She saw Mussolini as Mussolini—Mr. Mussolini having a bath, asking why his egg at breakfast wasn’t fresh, chucking his ferocious-looking daughter under the chin. When she learned that Hitler had been a house-painter, when she realized that he really intended to keep that ridiculous-looking moustache, she could never take him seriously again and thought of him as someone who needed poultices, Kruschen salts and warm underclothing. She learnt that her views on politics seemed to her friends very silly, so she kept silent about them as well as she could. There were other things about which she said as little as possible. For example, that she liked to go to church. This seemed to all her friends a sign of imbecility—because if she went to church she could have no brains at all. Queerly enough, had she been a Roman Catholic her intelligence would not have been accused. This she did not even begin to try and understand. The fact was that she liked to go to church and so she went. She did all the things that made her happy and interfered with other people’s happiness as little as possible, but she did not think about anything very consciously. She moved and acted by instinct.

Now on this lovely afternoon, very early in the adventure-seeking New Year, she was going with her daughter Kitty as far as Hanover Square where Kitty had a dressmaker. After this she would probably walk in the Park.

She delighted to walk out with her daughter because she was so very proud of her. She knew of mothers, like Jessie Pinot for instance, who would rather die than be seen out with their daughters because of the age that it made them. But she, Meg Delaney, did not care of what age anything made her, and indeed looked forward quite eagerly to being a very old lady still able to enjoy a theatre. Herself and Kitty had almost exactly the same appreciation of small events and unexpected persons, and this made a walk delightful. Meg, of course, attracted attention in the streets because of her gay colours and large size, but for some reason she was never absurd. She wore large hats, flowing cloaks of dark red, dull gold, purple, and with her fine carriage, dark eyes and high colouring looked what Princess Corleone ought to look—that ‘miserable little scratching hen of a thing’ as Millie Pake called her. Kitty was tall also, and the pair of them floating down Bond Street was a fine sight.

Just at Agnew’s door they encountered Marjorie Blandin. Lady Marjorie Blandin, related to all the best families and descended on every side from Ethelred the Unready, was a stout, mottle-faced lady whose work in life was to take out obscure girls in the ‘Season’ and be paid for it. She hadn’t herself a penny, but she knew everybody and was physically indefatigable, so her prices were high. It was, however, a ‘dog’s life,’ as she explained now outside Agnew’s, where there was very little room on the pavement.

‘A dog’s life, darling—how sweet you’re looking, Kitty! Well, I think I’ve got those two Glowrie girls and a fat price too. Mama was all right. She’d pay anything to get her little ones through the hoops. But Papa—what a man! And the girls. Plain! Quite frightful—and he insists on everything—Ascot, Cowes, the Beaminster Dance. However, money’s no object and—well, dear, I must be moving. Tell Larry when you see him that Gladys Dorington has some Tang horses that are real treasures. Hoopy would have a fit if he knew she was selling them, but she’s counting on his not noticing they’re gone. Bring anyone to lunch any day, she says. Just ring up. Well, darling——’

‘That reminds me,’ Kitty said as they moved forward. ‘I met the dearest little man in our hall two or three days ago. He’d been visiting Millie and Helen.’

‘Yes, dear.’

‘Why did Marjorie Blandin remind me? ... Oh yes, I know—because she looks so very well fed. This little man looked as though he was half-starved. His clothes were shabby too. But he might have been King of England, the dignity he had. A very old friend of Millie and Helen. He lives in Shepherd Market.’

Her mother interrupted unexpectedly.

‘Do you like Alice Van Renn, darling?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Nor do I. I was quite vexed with Larry for bringing her in on New Year’s morning. I can’t see with the best will in the world why she appeals to men.’

They negotiated the traffic and turned aside up Conduit Street.

‘It’s because she never says anything.’

‘Oh, do men like that?’

‘Some men do.’

‘Well, I’ve talked too much all my life and I’ve been liked by a good many men one way and another. Darling, are you going to be extravagant at the dressmaker’s?’

‘Certainly not.’ Kitty laughed. ‘But I’d love to be.’

‘I hope you’re not, because I believe we’re very poor at the moment. Your father woke up in the middle of last night and laughed like anything. When I asked what it was, he said that he saw us engaging a barrel-organ and a monkey very shortly and wouldn’t we do it well? I said I wouldn’t mind in the least, and neither I would. I don’t mind anything so long as we’re all well. But what I want to know’—Meg stopped for a while and gazed at the shops—‘is who has all the money? Because a lot of money there is somewhere. Now, for instance, that woman Marjorie Blandin was talking about will pay anything to get her daughters on, while we——’

‘It’s changed hands, I suppose,’ Kitty said. ‘It’s always changing.’

‘I’ve never had any,’ Meg said cheerfully. ‘Never my whole life long. And I must say I haven’t minded.’

As they turned into Hanover Square they were both conscious of the sky. In the life of any Londoner the sky plays little part, but, on occasion, it is as though the houses retire, as rocks draw back when the ship moves out into the open sea. Then buildings and streets dwindle into nothingness, or a kind of wreckage that the sky has flung down. If clouds are flying, the surface of the earth, with its scattering of bricks, mortar, and pigmy figures, is scaled and bared as saucers and cups are tumbled off a table by the dragging of a cloth. Light flashes between clouds contemptuously on to the huddle of rubbish men have gathered here.

But now, above the Square, although the wind drove the clouds there was no anger nor contempt. The clouds were small and light, misted with an orange glow because there was fog about on this early January afternoon; the mist was in the small fleecy rounded clouds that drove forward like tufts blowing in the breeze from some divine daisy. But the fog did not touch the pale limpid blue of the real sky-flood, which was clear and infinitely pure.

The orange light touched the chimney-pots and roofs with a spreading thin gauze of shadow. The light fell in ladders to the street as it does when the sun shines on a dusty room. The sky was so alive with colour and movement that the town itself seemed to crouch, as though watching on its knees, eyes staring upward at the life and splendour.

Already dark shadows were clutching the knees of the buildings, so that in the heavens all was glowing and on earth there was half-obscurity. The orange light became with every moment more intense as the little clouds began to be hustled by the wind into a gathered company as a shepherd hustles sheep.

Kitty, gazing for a moment upwards, felt, once more, that beating excitement of expectation. ‘Something is going to happen to me.... I have been waiting for years....’

‘What a lovely sky!’ Meg said. ‘I think I’ll have an hour in the Park. It will be light there for a long time yet.’

‘All right, darling. Don’t be picked up by a strange man. And be back for tea. Connie Beaminster’s bringing a friend.’

Meg laughed. ‘You know, still, old as I am, I never take a walk anywhere without thinking something may happen....’

She started off, a ship in full sail.

Kitty looked round for her dressmaker. As always the Church dominated the Square. So many absurd, wicked, greedy, snobbish, idle, wasteful marriages! And perhaps some good ones. But now all was very still there. Some sparrows were hopping from one step to another. Light had been falling on the pillars, but even as Kitty looked it was switched away as though by an impatient hand. Her dressmaker’s was below the Church on the same side, near an Art Gallery. She stayed for a moment to look in the little window of this, for there was a picture of the kind that she didn’t understand at all—a white curling thing with black edges in the middle, two purple blobs that might be fruit or mightn’t, something brown that looked like a broken violin, and squares and slabs of colour, silver, dark brown and black. Fastened to the picture was a label with the word ‘Braque,’ whether the title of the picture or the name of the painter she didn’t know. ‘Now what,’ she thought, ‘is the use of that? Why shouldn’t you paint fruit like fruit and violins like violins?’—and yet as she looked she was aware that the colours formed a pattern and that they were exquisitely painted. Such deep and glowing silver she had never seen, and, in a mysterious fashion beyond her understanding, the picture bore a closer relation to the shining sky and the dark walls of the Church than it would have done had it been an exact reproduction. Then she saw, next to the little Gallery, an Art-shop over whose window was painted in big silver letters: ‘ZANTI LTD.’ She had been to her dressmaker’s often enough but had never before seen this name. It was as though, in these moments, extra vision was given to her, she was seeing everything with redoubled intensity, colours were twice-times rich and the dusk was deep, like forest-dark, about her.

Set in the middle of Zanti’s window was a rose-coloured bowl. There were also some ivory-coloured figures, a triptych of Limoges enamel and a piece of old rose and gold embroidered cloth. She stared at the bowl: its design was simple and the colour wavered like sunset on water. Of course it was absurd. She could not remotely afford such a thing. But it would be pleasant to enquire. She entered the shop. The full glow of the sky, streaming in over the short buildings on the other side of the street, illuminated it. It was a small shop but held, as Kitty perceived, a number of beautiful things.

There was a young man behind the counter.

‘I beg your pardon——’ He looked at her gravely. He was a pale young man with black hair, dark eyes.

Kitty, feeling very tall and as though she had no right to be there when she knew that she could afford no purchase, said:

‘No. It’s nothing. I shouldn’t trouble you. But the rose-coloured bowl in the window. Might I look at it?’

‘Of course, madam. No trouble at all.’ He drew back the curtain of the window, and while he leant forward she realized that he was very thin and little more than a boy. He returned with the bowl in his hands. ‘Do you mean this, madam?’

‘Oh no. It was—yes, I suppose I do.’ She was examining it. All the colour seemed to have gone from it. ‘Why—now—it isn’t rose-coloured. I thought——’

‘Probably the sun was shining on it. Things often look different in the window. It is a very old bowl. We have had it in the shop a great many years. It is Italian fifteenth-century—Mr. Zanti was very proud of it, I believe. I don’t know because I never saw Mr. Zanti.’

Kitty put down the bowl very carefully.

‘Thank you very much. I had no right to bother you, because I knew I couldn’t begin to afford anything so beautiful.’

She smiled and the young man smiled. He had a smile so attractive, so friendly, intelligent and shy, that Kitty herself continued to smile.

‘If you would only wait a minute or two, Mr. Zimmerman will be back. If there were anything else——’

‘Mr. Zimmerman?’

‘Yes. Mr. Zimmerman owns the shop. Mr. Zimmerman and his son. They bought it from Mr. Zanti and kept the name because he was well known. I am only the assistant,’ he added. He was so very thin: did he have enough to eat? she wondered. ‘I haven’t been here very long,’ he went on, ‘and I always prefer it when Mr. Zimmerman is in. I might make a mistake.’

‘You won’t with me,’ Kitty said cheerfully. ‘Because I can’t afford to buy anything.’

They were staring into one another’s faces as though they were asking one another questions. The Italian bowl lay between them.

‘Then you haven’t been doing this always?’

‘Oh no. I’ve been many different things.’

‘Do you like this?’

‘Mr. Zimmerman is very kind, but I’m so afraid of breaking something or mistaking values. Of course all the prices are marked, but everything here is so precious.’

‘Do you like beautiful things?’ she asked.

‘Oh, I like things. Anybody would. But the world being what it is! If you only knew how much some of these cost! And so many people haven’t enough to live on.’

‘You’d rather do something else?’

‘I’d like to be out of doors. I’d rather garden than anything. I love flowers.’

‘Yes, so do I.’

‘And the mountains and the sea,’ he added.

‘Can’t you go away, then? Are you married? Does anything prevent you?’

It was nothing unusual for one of the Delaneys to enter into conversation with a stranger; ask questions and be asked by them. At the same time Kitty thought the young man’s voice, eyes and smile so very oddly personal to herself, as though she had asked for someone with just that delicacy and friendliness to be found for her. And lo, he was there!

‘I am tied rather,’ he said, his eyes on her face. ‘My father is paralysed. I have a sister who looks after him, but I have to make what I can for us all.’

‘Paralysed! How terrible!’

‘It isn’t really. My father is very happy, although moving his head is about all he can do. He was a builder and fell from a roof and injured his spine. But he’s like no one else in the world—no one anywhere.’

‘Wouldn’t it be better for him if you lived in the country?’

‘Perhaps it would.’

‘Would you think me impertinent?’ She paused, but, looking him in the eyes again, realized that he would think nothing impertinent from her. ‘If you were to give me your name and address I might hear of something. One does sometimes.’ She felt in her case. ‘Here is my card.’

He said nothing, but out of a drawer produced one of the firm’s cards, wrote on it and gave it to her.

‘That’s my name—Alton Foster. And my address.’ He took her card and put it in his pocket without looking at it. He was suddenly formal. But she held out her hand. She felt the thin warm texture of his hand through her glove. She smiled.

‘Good evening.’

‘Good evening, madam. And thank you.’

She turned near the door. He was standing there staring at her.

‘Please forgive me ... if my questions ...’

He went to the door and opened it for her.

‘Don’t lose the card,’ he said in an urgent, trembling whisper.

Meg Delaney engaged a taxi. This was wrong of her when only last night Fred had told her how poor they were. She knew that it was wrong, but she wanted to have all her time in that light, under that sky, in the open freedom of Regent’s Park.

She told the man to drive to the Botanical Gardens and then sat straight up, looking out at the sky and feeling very happy.

She should not be happy, because in the first place she should have walked to Oxford Street, only a step, and taken an omnibus (although she could walk it all in no time!), and secondly, Fred had, she knew perfectly well, begun a flirtation with Alice Van Renn. However, poverty and Fred’s flirtations were no new things, which was possibly the reason why she did not feel as unhappy as she should. Hundreds and hundreds of times Fred had flirted, and possibly hundreds and hundreds of times Fred had been unfaithful. But how young had Meg been when for the first time she had learnt that there was one law for the woman, quite another for the man! About six years old, perhaps. She had at least been very young indeed when that hateful Mrs. Delias came and stayed so often in that little Clarges Street house and gave her sweets and took her into her bed with her.

She knew that she had with Fred a bond so strong and deep that no woman born of man could disturb it. And she wanted Fred to be happy, as indeed she wanted everyone to be happy. And healthy strong men in their middle years had certain problems to solve. She knew all this and allowed for it. But she must be honest with herself and would confess then that Alice Van Renn and her greedy old mother gave her the creeps.

It was this creepiness that ought to cause Meg uneasiness, because there was altogether something wrong in a fine healthy man like Fred flirting with a beautiful young corpse like Alice. Meg now unexpectedly burst out laughing inside the cab because, in the very middle of Oxford Street traffic, a Sealyham puppy on the end of a lead had sat down four-square, refusing the urgent solicitations of a stout man who held in the other hand a tissue-paper carton containing flowers. The man looked exquisitely absurd, being of all things in the world the most ridiculous, an Englishman who hated to be made a fool of in public. Such a very small puppy, such a very stout man! It was always thus: at the moment when you should be seriously upset about something life provided an irresistible incongruity. It was like dear Graham Pender, slipping on the icy path at Strathpeffer and falling on his behind, just when he was bending forward to kiss her. Dear Graham! How adorable he had been all those years ago when she, nineteen and divinely beautiful, had stayed that winter with Aunt Grace Linklater in Scotland! They had been engaged, Graham and she, for four whole months, and no one had known it, and then off to China he had gone, years had passed, she had married, he had married.... Well, well ... to think of it, and that night after the dance at the Wotherspoons’ they had so nearly, so very, very nearly ... Only a miracle had saved her, a miracle and Graham’s untimely sense of the incongruous. Meg’s eyes were misted. The Queen’s Hall swam in a vague of tenderness. Dear Graham! She had never loved anyone in quite the same way again: Fred more, perhaps, but not in quite the same way. And if she had married Graham there would not have been either Kitty or Bullock. Where would they have been? And what would Graham’s children have been like? Tall and spare with high cheekbones and very, very intelligent.

The taxi stopped at the entrance to the Botanical Gardens and Meg got out, stepping at once into a blaze of light and colour made personal and poignant by a touch of frosty air.

‘Thank you very much,’ she said to the driver.

He was an old man with a white powder-coloured nose, rheumy eyes and a large grey woollen comforter.

‘What a lovely afternoon!’ she said.

‘Yes, ma’am.’ He leaned towards her as though he would confide an important secret. ‘I’ve got a shocking cold,’ he said.

‘I’m so sorry. What are you doing for it?’

‘Five o’clock my time’s up. I’m going straight ‘ome and put my feet in mustard and water.’

‘Yes, you do,’ she said, nodding her head confidentially. ‘That’s an excellent thing.’ As she walked along the Inner Circle she wondered as to his home, his family and his general comforts. Was he as poor as they, the Delaneys, were? He was sure, in all probability, of his food and his bed.

In positive fact the Delaneys were sure of neither. Forced out of Charles Street, where would they go? Oh! there were plenty who would take them in! But it wouldn’t be their own beds or their own food. Fred would of course get work. But what would he do, what could he do in this new world where, if you were not efficient at something, you were lost? Why was the world so over-full of people now? It hadn’t been in her younger days. Ever since the Great War, in which millions of people had been killed, the world had been overcrowded. How very odd! She was walking on grass now and before her rose a sloping green hill canopied with a sky of rose and blue that the increasing cold seemed to crystallize. Children were running, dogs were barking, the bare tree-trunks gave off, as it seemed to her, a kind of smoke, of faintly amber shadow. Yes, the sun was sinking. She climbed the little hill, found two small children crying because they refused to go home, and stood face to face with Graham Pender.

She knew him at once. Year melting into year had not changed him. She could see him at this moment, here on this hill, bending forward to kiss her, his feet slipping, his little cry of dismay.... He was standing very still, looking at the rosy sky.

‘Well, Graham,’ she said.

He turned as though he had been shot. He stared.

‘I beg your pardon.’

‘I’m Meg Wendover.’

Colour flashed into his brown, thin and very distinguished face.

‘Meg!’

‘Yes, I’m Meg. I recognized you at once.’

He shot out his hand, caught hers, and then held it, staring and staring. His hand was trembling.

‘Meg! Meg! Meg!’ he said over and over.

She was herself so greatly excited that she put her other hand on his shoulder.

‘Dear Graham! How enchanting! Although I should of course really be angry. I wrote last—over twenty years ago. Not a word since.’ She took both her hands back to herself and tried to be dignified.

‘Often and often I’ve wanted to,’ he began eagerly. (His eyes were as bright and blue as they had ever been, his height as commanding, his forehead as noble!) ‘But I saw in the paper that you married, and I seemed destined for the East for ever and ever, and I ... I married too and—and——’

‘Don’t explain anything.’ They began to walk down the hill. ‘Of course you married. What woman could resist you? And I saw that you had been knighted. And your books are famous and so clever that no one can understand them. And you are just the same. Years haven’t made the slightest difference to you.’

‘My hair’s white,’ taking off his bowler hat. Yes, it was, and with his blue eyes, brown colour, tall, slim, erect body, made him more beautiful than ever!

‘Put on your hat. You’ll catch cold. Tell me everything.’

He laughed. It was plain that he was delighted indeed to see her.

‘My wife and I have come to England to live. Surbiton. I’m up for two days. I want to see the English pictures at Burlington House. We are going to Marie Tempest to-night—Old Folks At Home.’

He told her everything in exactly the direct boyish way that he had done—when?—was it only yesterday?

‘Oh dear, I’m so glad we met! And I felt that something would happen—I knew it! I knew it!’

‘And you?’

‘I’m Mrs. Delaney. We live in Charles Street and have two children. And I’ve got fat.’

‘No. No, you haven’t. You look superb—and somehow a child still.’

A thin little woman wearing an ugly hat so that she reminded Meg of a penwiper was coming across the grass toward them.

‘This is my wife,’ he said. ‘I walked up the hill to look at the sky. Evie, this is an old friend of mine, Meg Delaney. We knew each other in Scotland when we were very, very young.’

(Evie, thought Meg. What a ridiculous name for her!)

‘How do you do, Lady Pender?’ Meg said.

‘How do you do? An old friend. How very agreeable!’

They walked to the Inner Circle, talking about Marie Tempest.

‘I don’t care for the theatre,’ Lady Pender said. ‘But my husband enjoys it. It makes it so very late returning to Surbiton.’

‘What does it matter! We only live once!’ said Graham.

‘We do indeed,’ said Meg joyfully, ‘and must make the most of every minute.’ She stopped a taxi. ‘Now that is my address and—wait a moment—that is our telephone number, although it is in the book.’

‘I think I have a card.’ He felt for his pocket-book. ‘Yes, here it is.’

They looked one another for an instant in the eyes. Then he took off his hat, gave a little bow and led Lady Pender away.