Illyrian Spring Page 5

  ‘No, to Spalato,’ she answered, and escaped.

  Sitting on the bed in her white-panelled cabin, of which she proved to be the sole occupant, Lady Kilmichael opened the fat envelope. Yes – there was a letter from Walter, and one from Linnet too. With a nervous need to fortify herself against the unknown, she lit a cigarette; then rose, pulled off her hat and straightened her hair. A strange mixture of emotions swept through her in those moments; fear, the same fear that had seized her in the basilica at Torcello, mixed oddly with old resentments; a little touch of stubborn pride, tenderness too – the helpless tenderness that the sight of Walter’s firm scholarly writing, curiously beautiful, always brought on an envelope with her name. Such wonderful words envelopes like that had once contained! They flocked into her mind, now, like a cloud of tender doves – lovely, simple, caressing words; she remembered them so well, though it was long since she had seen or heard them. The doves were flown – just when, just why, she could not tell; but gradually they had vanished, and there was no such music now in the place where they had been. An empty dove-cote, a cooling hearth – pictures like those rose in her mind as she sat, the envelope still unopened in her hands, while the piles bordering the channel moved swiftly past the portholes. Then she opened the letter.

  If Walter Kilmichael had written then with any hint of tenderness, or of distress – perhaps even of anger, which might have betrayed distress or pain, his wife would almost certainly have melted, got off the boat at Trieste, and taken the first train home on the heels of a telegram. But the letter contained none of these things. It was a chilly affair, breathing a balanced resentment, administering a reasoned rebuke to tiresome and unworthy folly; its tone was superior and undisturbed; the phrase ‘working yourself up’ occurred in it. It made no answer to her ultimatum, merely brushed it aside with something like contempt. Walter did indeed ask her plans, demanded an address, suggested a return; there were people coming to London who would need entertaining; her place, it was suggested, was at home. ‘Surely you can paint here, if you must paint – you have your studio,’ he wrote.

  After reading it Grace Kilmichael sat in profound dejection, tinged with resentment. The letter answered nothing, settled nothing, altered nothing; it left everything exactly where it was before. Walter did not even take her seriously – there was only the old enervating superiority and contempt. Must she go back to all that? Was it her duty? She opened Linnet’s letter, thirstily – she longed for news of the child.

  Linnet’s communications to her mother were apt to be brief. This one was:

  Dear Mums,

  I hope you are having a lovely time. This season is being the usual hurtle. Quite fun. Aunt G. says I ought really to have a car of my own – however we contrive somehow. James is a literary creature and I bribe him with books; so long as he can sit under an arc light and read David Garnett, he doesn’t care what time he drives me home; unlike old Judd! Poppy is back – he seems just as usual. Apparently the Americans won’t take his advice – also just as usual. He is rather sour about them. A major disaster has overtaken my evening cloak – we were driving back from Cambridge with Billy and encountered one of those tar sprayers; of course the tar was cold at that hour of the morning, but still it stuck! My green organdie was involved too. That doesn’t so much matter, but the cloak is vital – Aunt G. suggested combing one out of M’t Marks, off the hook, so I did. This involved opening an account – I hope that’s all right? My overdraft was too large to pay.

  I hope you are painting a lot and liking it.

  Much love,

  Linnet.

  P.S. – I see no earthly reason why you should hurry home if you are working – Poppy and I and everyone are functioning perfectly.’

  Grace read this letter twice, and the second time smiles stirred about her mouth. Linnet was certainly all right. Careless, elliptical little puss! – of course there had been an accident, though she didn’t say so; but then they never did say things definitely. And what could she, Grace, do, if she were at home? Linnet would still hoosh about the countryside in young men’s cars in the small hours. How like her, too, to find out the weak place in the armour of Gina’s second chauffeur, and use it for her own ends! Grace smiled again – what a taking child she was. And this was a kind letter, even to her mother. She glanced again at the postscript. It almost looked – yes, really it almost looked as if Linnet knew or guessed that her Father was urging a return, and had put in her little neat casual oar to say it wasn’t necessary; it almost looked as if Linnet, for once, was on her Mother’s side. But there Lady Kilmichael pulled herself up vigorously. No, that was nonsense, and would be wrong even if it weren’t; she always tried so hard to present a united parental front to the children, never to let them think that there were sides to take. True, Walter was a difficult person to be part of a united front with; but still, she had tried. However, the main fact was clear; Linnet didn’t need her and was all right. No duty there was involved.

  She read Walter’s letter again – and then put it away in her despatch-case, locking the lid with a certain firmness. No – she would not go back. To go back now would be to stultify the tremendous moral effort she had made in coming away, perhaps the biggest effort she had ever made in her life. It was no good going back until something was settled, until Walter had seen, indeed, that there was anything to settle. And there was more to it than that. In this fortnight of freedom she had begun to see, vaguely and dimly, that there was something she must do about herself before she returned, if she was not to be swamped again in the old subservience and discouragement, which after all made no one happy. What needed doing, exactly, was still all cloudy and uncertain – clear thought, as has already been observed, was not Lady Kilmichael’s strong suit. But during her happy days in Venice she had still, at intervals, gone on asking herself the questions she had asked on the journey to Paris – where she had gone wrong with Walter and Linnet? – and she had begun to get an idea, not of what the answer was, but, so to speak, in what county the answer might be looked for. She had never thought Linnet, or Walter, wholly or even mainly in fault – she had also looked, always, for her own mistakes to account for their painful behaviour towards her. But she had looked for actual things said or done, and the new idea was nothing less than this, that what provoked their attitude was less anything she said or did, than what she was. And what was more, she had become certain that freedom had something to do with it. Out here, because she was free, she was all right; she could look at everything more directly, without the confusion engendered by pain and timidity. She felt sure she would manage better if she could remain free. But how that was to be achieved she could not tell; freedom at home was almost inconceivable. In her painting she did indeed escape into liberty, but into another world, whence she was perpetually dragged back to the daily life in which, like Rousseau’s Universal Man, she was forever in chains.

  Lady Kilmichael, though she did not realise it, was beginning (rather late in the day) to feel the pressure of one of the more peculiar aspects of English life – the moral and intellectual subordination of women to their husbands. This phenomenon is of course not universal, but it is common enough to strike the observant Continental or American with amazement. And the attempt to define logically the causes from which it springs almost always ends in failure, because the English are not a logical people, and most of their profoundest instincts elude definition, as a very intelligent Dutchman has recently discovered. We may tell the observant American that it is due to our Teutonic ancestry, and that he will find the same thing in Germany; we may suggest that it originated with Puritanism and takes its Oriental colour from the traditions of the Old Testament; sociologists may point out that it is mainly a middle-class phenomenon, little exhibited in poorer households, where the daily work of her hands makes the labourer’s wife queen in a small kingdom; feminists will seek to prove that it is due entirely to lack of female education and the economic subjection of women. Much or all of this may we
ll be true; men have long been better educated than women, and their work, at least in the professional classes, tended to widen the intellectual gulf between them and their womenkind; while before legislation removed some of the gravest of married women’s economic disabilities, they were in a singularly helpless position – the wife whose husband was allowed by law to take her income, her jewels and even her children, and hand them over to a rival, had some reason to feel rather subordinate.

  But all this is too heavy, too definite, too pronounced; much of it no longer fits. A married woman’s property is now secure to her; females receive a fair education, vote, have careers. The women of England no longer march from the altar to the tomb with the words ‘And to obey’ sounding continually in their hearts, and the phrase ‘your Father knows best’ forever on their lips. Queen Victoria is not only dead, but, as an ideal of domestic life, dethroned. And yet, tenuous, elusive, but tenacious, this tradition of inferiority persists – subtly imposed by the husbands; tacitly and often unconsciously acquiesced in by the wives. Their views, somehow, are worth less than men’s; the moral initiative has passed from them; in some strange way – whether consciously or not – they are subordinate.

  Now this subjection was tiresome and fatiguing enough while it was subjection to one person only, the husband; but for Lady Kilmichael’s generation it had suddenly become subjection to their children as well, and when it reached that stage it became insupportable. What was really moving Grace Kilmichael, as she sat in her little white stateroom, was a dawning consciousness of her need to think and act as an independent creature, along her own lines, though she did not as yet clearly envisage it. But it was a vague conviction of where the trouble lay, and of the urgency of her need to deal with it in herself and by herself, which made her lock her despatch-case so firmly on Walter’s letter, and decide not to return to England, and not to answer it.

  Linnet’s letter, however, she would, she must answer. But not, if possible, from Trieste. Perhaps she could do something about that. Putting on her hat again, she went to the saloon to get some coffee. In the passage she encountered one of the white-uniformed officers; with conspicuous gallantry and a brilliant display of teeth he asked if he could help her in any way? (Lady Kilmichael’s clothes and figure, and a curious rather appealing youthfulness about her expression, were very apt to produce this effect on strange men.) In her halting but rather pretty Italian she said that perhaps he could – would it be possible to get letters posted, not in Trieste but in Venice? But most easily, he told her, studying her at the same time with evident curiosity as to what this charming creature had to conceal – the letters could be taken back to Venice and posted there. So Lady Kilmichael drank her coffee with a freer mind, and then went back to her stateroom and wrote to her Mother (‘Dearest Mother’) and then to Linnet (‘My darling child’). But she told neither of them where she was going, nor did she give any hint of a return either to London or to Antibes. And to Walter she did not write at all.

  FIVE

  When Lady Kilmichael went to have lunch after leaving Trieste she encountered Lady Roseneath’s nephew at the entrance to the saloon, and they went in and sat together. The other passengers appeared to be mostly Germans and Czechs – there was no one she knew. One face struck her as vaguely familiar – that of an oldish man in spectacles and a suit of unmistakeably Teutonic cut, who had tucked his napkin into his collar to eat his lunch. He had a remarkable head, very large, and of a certain nobility of structure, made superficially ridiculous by a bald top and a surrounding fringe of thick black hair, like a tonsure; his rugged face was full of a fiery intelligence; he ate his melon with ferocity, like a man destroying enemies. Grace was sure she had seen him before, but could not remember the place or occasion.

  When a chance acquaintanceship is renewed after an interval, it makes a curious jump forward towards intimacy, merely by virtue, it would seem, of the gap. As Lady Kilmichael sat at lunch now with the yellow-headed young man, she felt almost as if he were an old friend; they shared a past, if it was only one afternoon and evening long – what was more, they shared a secret from their only common acquaintance. It was true that their intercourse had now lost that quality of free irresponsibility, almost as of disembodied spirits, which belongs to conversation with a total stranger – and Grace would definitely have preferred him not to know her name. But she had never actually met his people, and she could only trust that the young man was not – on the whole it seemed unlikely – on terms of intimate correspondence with his Aunt. Any doubts she might have had on this head were soon set at rest. As they ate their melon – ‘Why do you know my Aunt?’ he began, with his usual method of free enquiry.

  ‘Oh, she’s an old friend of mine,’ said Grace.

  ‘Not a real friend?’ he pursued.

  ‘Yes, we were at school together,’ said Grace, amused by his pertinacity, ‘and we have always kept it up.’ His questions made her ask herself how much of a friend, really, she felt Lucia Roseneath to be – a thing she had never questioned before; but – ‘I’m very fond of her,’ she added loyally.

  ‘Oh, come – you can hardly be that!’ he expostulated. ‘She’s really a bore, you know.’

  Grace was shocked by this. ‘I expect our tastes differ,’ she said rather coldly.

  ‘I wonder. I’m not sure that they do, much,’ said this extraordinary young man. ‘You only say that, don’t you, because you don’t think a nice little boy ought to talk so about his Aunt.’ Grace half-smiled. He as it were pounced on the smile, triumphantly. ‘If you’re so fond of her, why didn’t you go to see her in Venice?’ he went on. ‘You were there over a week, and never went near her. I’ve got you there!’ He looked at her very contentedly.

  He had rather ‘got’ her, since she couldn’t explain her real reason for avoiding the friend she was so fond of. Grace did her best, but the memory of the lies she had told to her old friend only that morning cramped her style, and made her efforts sound most unconvincing, even to herself. As for the young man, he laughed.

  ‘The fact is,’ he said, ‘Aunt really bores me, and she bores you. Why is it unkind to recognise it? She only put me up to please my Mother, and I shall write her an excellent Collins (which will give her much more pleasure than my visit) and that will end it. What’s wrong with that?’

  Grace found it hard to say, to this pertinacious and analytical youth. She had a feeling that it was always wrong for the young to be critical of the old. So she merely said: ‘So long as you don’t hurt her feelings, I suppose it doesn’t matter,’ in a rather indifferent voice.

  The young man was curiously roused by this. ‘Of course I don’t hurt her feelings! I bore her quite as much as she bores me, and she makes no bones about letting me see it. I’m young, so my feelings don’t matter! In fact I believe lots of people think it’s good for the young to have their feelings lacerated!’ He paused for a moment. ‘I am really rather careful about people’s feelings,’ he went on in a different tone, looking at her seriously.

  Before Grace could reply, the book which she had brought in with her slipped from her lap. The young man stooped to pick it up for her, and caught sight of the title. ‘Oh, you’ve got Graham Jackson!’ he exclaimed. ‘Volume One – have you got all three with you?’

  Grace said she had.

  ‘Wonderful. Can I borrow them? It’s the only book for Dalmatian architecture.’

  ‘It seems to be the only guidebook of any sort for Dalmatia in English,’ said Grace, thinking of the vain enquiries she had made in London before starting. Really there were more guidebooks for the Sahara, she had felt.

  ‘Oh no, it isn’t!’ said the young man. ‘You just look at this,’ and he pulled out of his pocket a small book closely resembling a Baedeker, on the cover of which was printed ‘Guide-Handbook for Istria, Dalmatie and the Ionian Islands.’ ‘There you are – if you want to visit the Ionian Islands at any time, here is the book of the words!’

  ‘I never can remember which
the Ionian Islands are,’ Lady Kilmichael said, handing back the book.

  ‘Can’t you?’ said the young man. ‘They’re Corfu & Co.’

  As they lingered over their coffee, the man in spectacles passed close to their table, going out. ‘The Ducal Palace!’ Lady Kilmichael exclaimed.

  ‘What?’ asked the young man, not unnaturally astonished.

  ‘That man – that’s where I saw him.’ She had suddenly recognised the black-haired man as the bold individual whose example she had followed in the matter of lying on the floor to look at ceilings. She explained this to Nicholas Humphries – he showed no sign of disapproval; on the contrary, he seemed rather impressed, and Grace had a passing wonder whether the young did not disapprove of things as such, but only as done by their parents.

  When they went on deck after lunch, Humphries led Lady Kilmichael to two well-placed chairs with a Burberry thrown over them, explaining that he had kept one for her all the morning. Lady Kilmichael sat with her sketchbook on her lap, idly enjoying the sun, the sea and the sense of anticipation and adventure. Dalmatia – Illyria – lovely names for a place she was sure was lovely, a place she had always longed to see. Her companion sat immersed in the volume of Sir T. Graham Jackson’s work which he had seen at lunch. Now and then, though, he raised his head from the book, looked at her in a half-considering, half-questioning way for a moment or two, and then, without saying anything, went back to his reading. It was almost as if he were trying to make up his mind about her, or about something to do with her. This struck Lady Kilmichael as very odd. Young people naturally never regarded her with the smallest interest; she was accustomed to seeing the expression of civil attention, the due of the older generation, come across their faces like a mask when they spoke to her. She began to speculate about him again – especially his bitter strange words about painting on the steps of the Piazzetta; she wondered if she would learn any more about what lay behind that. Hardly – they would reach Spalato at six-thirty tomorrow morning, and then, no doubt, she would see no more of him. It was rather tantalising that Lady Roseneath’s only two communications which promised to throw any light on the reasons for his discontent should have been lost, owing to her unfortunate habit of talking through the siren. What was it that he had ‘got’? And what had he ‘lost’? she wondered, looking at his yellow head bent over the book, and his red profile. For the first time, now, she considered his face attentively, in detail. He was not really so plain, apart from his colouring; the nose was good, jutting boldly from the face; the mouth almost beautiful, with lips closing in a firm level line. Apart from his too frequent expression of discontent and unhappiness, it was quite a good face.