Snow and Roses Read online

  “Am I disturbing you, Lal?”

  “No, no.”

  “Come out for a few minutes. It’s such a heavenly night. Let’s have a stroll round the garden before we go to bed.”

  Outside the air was delicately cool. An almost full moon riding above the lime trees threw their sharply patterned shadows on the smooth turf, and picked out the white flowers in the herbaceous borders.

  “You haven’t heard anything from Hugh?”

  “No. Nothing at all. I don’t expect to till I see him at the cottage on Saturday night.”

  “I couldn’t wait. I couldn’t just sit still and leave it to him. I should want to reinforce the sensible side of him. Why don’t you find an excuse to ring him up, and have a talk? It might just tip the balance.”

  “That’s what I don’t want to do. It must be his decision.”

  “Won’t you put out a hand to save him from sacrificing himself to that blood-sucking neurotic?”

  “Not if that’s what he feels is the right thing to do.”

  “Doesn’t it ever occur to you—it certainly does to most of our pupils—that self-sacrifice for its own sake is an outdated conception?”

  “It isn’t self-sacrifice for its own sake. It’s because I love Hugh, and know him very well. I know that being a person of his quality he couldn’t feel at home with himself if he didn’t do what he believes to be right.”

  “I don’t think you realize what you’re doing to him or letting him do to you.”

  Flora often thought the same about Lalage and Martin Croft. She did not answer. They strolled down the path leading to the boathouse. Here the tall trees cut off the moonlight from them and they had to tread carefully over the tree roots. The sedgey river smell was in their nostrils, and the air felt cooler.

  Lalage, with the increased energy of one going back to her own concerns, said,

  “Martin went up to London yesterday and had lunch with Kitty Storridge. He rang me up this morning to tell me about it.”

  “I’m sure he did.”

  “He said she was looking prettier than ever. She wants him to go and stay on a Greek island with them in September. I wonder Humphrey Storridge doesn’t object.”

  “He probably knows there’s nothing worth objecting to. Kitty must have other admirers who are far more likely to be a real menace to him than Martin.”

  “Oh do you think so?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I wish I had a villa on a Greek island that I could ask people to.”

  Lalage suddenly laughed at herself.

  “Martin is such an awful snob, you know. He likes her being Lady Kitty. He likes her couturier dresses, and her jewels and her furs, and the house in London and one in the country … all the things that make her so much more glamorous and exciting than a working woman like me.

  “He has these fancies. They’re candy floss really. Last year it was Madge Grantley you were unhappy about, and now she’s acting in America and he never sees her.”

  “They write. She’ll come back and it will probably all start up again. They come and go.”

  “But you don’t, Lal. He’s a faithful friend of yours in his own way.”

  “I suppose so. I wish I didn’t always feel a bit frightened of him, as if I was never sure that I could quite come up to his standard. I was frightened of my father in the same way. He was frightening, especially to a schoolgirl. I remember once having dinner with him alone not long after my mother had died. He was sunk right down in his own thoughts and didn’t speak at all. I tried to make conversation, and I heard myself being idiotic. At last he said, ‘Lalage, please don’t talk unless you have something to say that interests you and might possibly interest me.’ I felt annihilated. It was all I could do not to cry. I remember now trying to get through a plateful of meat and it seemed to taste of tears. At that time I just felt that I was hopeless. Later on I thought my father had been unnecessarily harsh with a nervous adolescent trying to be agreeable. But when I told the story to Martin he said, ‘What an excellent recipe for conversation. I should like to have known your father.’”

  “Hugh would never say that. He’d understand how the schoolgirl must have felt, and feel sorry that her father was so hard on her.”

  “But perhaps he taught me something. I don’t prattle much in company, do I?”

  “Not nearly as much as I do,” Flora said cheerfully.

  “You enjoy more different kinds of things than I do and you like most people, so naturally you have more to talk about.”

  “I see that Martin was admiring your father for establishing an intellectual value; but Hugh wouldn’t admire anybody for hurting someone. It’s a thing he couldn’t do himself.”

  “Oh, nonsense, Flora. There’s nobody who couldn’t do it sometimes. I think it would be a weakness not to be able to.”

  Flora thought that it was a weakness from which Martin Croft was remarkably free, but she laughed and said pacifically,

  “Don’t let’s quarrel about them. I suppose we’ve each found what suits us.”

  “Up to a point.”

  They had reached the boathouse, and stood on the landing-stage, hearing the river water lap against the raft. Two old scullers, for which there was no room in the boat-house, were roped to a pole and gently knocking together. The shivering leaves of a tall aspen made a continual sound like rain.

  “Martin is coming to dinner with me in Hall tomorrow. Will you support him on the other side and come to coffee afterwards?”

  “Sorry, I can’t. I’m going out to dinner with Walter Brackley.”

  “Walter who? Oh, your cousin, isn’t he? You have so many relations I can’t keep track of them. I suppose it’s because I have hardly any myself, so I get no practice.”

  “Walter isn’t really a relation. He’s Isobel’s brother-in-law, Guy’s half-brother. Which makes him almost part of the family, but we don’t often see him. He’s a journalist, he was a foreign correspondent for years, but he’s now editor of foreign news on the Day. He’s got a wife called Karen, and a grown-up daughter, and a son at school—or perhaps Tom may have left school by now. I really don’t know, it’s quite a time since I saw any of them. I wish I hadn’t said I’d go out to dinner with Walter. I don’t want to be bothered with indifferent people this week.”

  “A good dinner instead of St Frid’s muck is always something.”

  They were silent for a minute listening to the lap of water. A light wind brought the scent of hawthorn from the meadows across the river, and shifted the branches of the aspen so that the planks they were standing on were splashed with moonlight.

  “Has Nan rewritten the Lost Sister poem yet?”

  “She hasn’t said anything about it. But she’ll think it over, and perhaps do something quite different with it. Nothing is ever wasted on Nan. That’s what makes her so exciting to teach.”

  “I wish I had one like that. I’ve got two or three good ones, but not one with the spark. Flora, what on earth should I do if you went to Fordwick?”

  “I don’t suppose I shall. They probably wouldn’t want me. Hugh might very much dislike the idea of my following him there—even if he goes, that is. If I did go it couldn’t be at once. You could come too. No you couldn’t because of Martin. They do complicate our lives, don’t they?”

  “They do indeed.”

  “But we don’t want them uncomplicated; or they would be.”

  “It’s just on midnight, you know. Have you brought your key?”

  “No.”

  “Neither have I. I think we’d better go in. I’ve got a very full day tomorrow.”

  “What are you thinking about all this time?”

  “I’m listening to you, Walter.”

  “Oh no, you’re not.”

  “Yes, I am. First you told me you’d had lunch with Guy and heard all about their holiday in Brittany at Easter. Then you began to tell me about a friend of yours in Athens. You couldn’t get any news of him and you were af
raid he’d been imprisoned by the Colonels. You said, ‘He was a man who would never be able to keep his mouth shut.’”

  “Yes, you played that bit back all right by ear. But there’s something on your mind all the same.”

  She was surprised by his penetration. She had never thought about him. He came and went she knew, between London and any place where the worst trouble was going on at the moment, he wrote articles which she admired if she happened to read them, but as a person he had only been to her Isobel’s brother-in-law, half of the entity Karen and Walter, who sometimes appeared at family christenings and weddings.

  She looked at him to see him. It was a square dark face, lively with intelligence and humour, something pugnacious in the set of the jaw, a hint of melancholy and underlying dissatisfaction, also perhaps of temper.

  “I am bothered about something. I can’t tell you what it is because it doesn’t only concern me.”

  “I’m sorry. I hope it works out all right for you.” He said this with such a genuine warmth of kindness that it reached down to her shut-off current of feeling.

  “You are nice, Walter! It’s very kind of you to take me out to this luxurious dinner.”

  “The pleasure is mine. I hardly ever have a chance of seeing you; you may be worried, Flora, but you are looking very well and very pretty.”

  She smiled, pleased, and prettier for being told that she was.

  “I thought that as I had to come to Oxford you might be able to spare me an evening. We don’t often meet. You know that I don’t go about the world any more. I am foreign news editor now, based on London.”

  “Yes I heard about that. Are you glad?”

  “Yes, and no. I loved moving about. But I’ve had a lot of it, and I had my fifty-second birthday last year.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know or I would have sent you a birthday card.”

  “I was in Saigon at the time so it might not have reached me. Did you know that Karen and I are getting a divorce?”

  “No, I hadn’t heard that. Has it all been very distressing? I’m sorry.”

  She had never thought about their relationship. She would have said if asked that she liked Walter but did not much like Karen. Karen had a way of saying to her “Of course you are so clever”, in a disparaging tone, but both of them had just been part of the outer fringe of family life.

  “We’ve been moving that way for some time. Karen wants to marry a man with whom she’s been having an affair for several years. No blame to her. I looked outside our marriage before she did. She and this chap agreed to wait until his daughter and our Tom had left school. Now he’s getting a divorce so that he can marry Karen, and she’s getting one from me. It will be through in a month.”

  “I hope you don’t mind very much.”

  “I don’t like the legal end of something that began with feeling. But the truth is that we were never right for each other, and we’ve been growing steadily further apart so that we both felt cramped and miserable. It was just possible while I was out of the country so often, but as soon as we had to face a settled life together it was hell. Living with somebody uncongenial is like living in a room without oxygen. It’s a relief to have come to the end of it. The only person who is really distressed is my stepmother.”

  Mrs Brackley, Isobel’s mother-in-law, who had beautifully dressed grey hair and well-cut woollen suits, and said, “Call me Janet, dear,” and, “I never know why everybody is so hard on young people, I always find them courteous and charming.”

  “I’d almost forgotten she wasn’t your real mother.”

  “Oh no, my mother was a very different character.”

  “I don’t think I’ve heard anything about her.”

  “I don’t suppose you have. She died before I was three. She was Cornish. She grew up at a small place along the coast from Mevagissey. Her father kept a pub there. She was a sea-gypsy of a girl, always in or on the water. She loved swimming and sailing better than anything in the world. I can’t think why she married my father. He and a friend went down there and stayed at the pub for a fortnight’s holiday, and that did it. He was young and she was young and they were both very nice-looking and of course a novelty to each other. I think it must have been the one rash, spontaneous action of my father’s life.”

  “Were they happy together?”

  “I don’t know. He never talked to me about her. It was his sister who told me what little I know of her. She was very fond of me, apparently, but my aunt said they all thought she handled me much too casually, she took me out in all weathers, not in their opinion properly wrapped up. They thought she didn’t take enough trouble about making my father comfortable, and was careless about the house and her own clothes. I should think that indoor domestic life bored her. She used to rush off to Cornwall whenever she could; people there often saw her wading into the sea with me slung over her shoulder. Then one day, when she had left me on the beach with an old woman who was picking up driftwood, she swam too far out. She was a strong swimmer, but they think she must have got caught in a current, they are very treacherous in that bay. She was drowned.”

  “It’s sad that you can’t remember her.”

  “I don’t remember missing her but I do remember having a feeling when I was small that something was missing. I lived for a time with my grandparents, in the country. My father often used to come at week-ends, but he never had a turn for young children. I didn’t look forward to his visits and I shouldn’t think that he did. It was much better for me when he married Janet and there was a home.”

  “Was she kind to you? I should think she meant to be.”

  “She was kind. I was a tiresome, wayward child, but she had married my father meaning to do her best for me, and she did. When the two girls and later Guy came along, of course I liked having them after I got over the first shock of not being the only one. Janet was very fair, she never made any difference between us that she could help. I began to know when I got into my teens that she wasn’t my kind of person, and from that I went on to knowing that my father wasn’t either. I got difficult again. I wanted to get out. I did get out when I was seventeen, I ran away to the Spanish war, and after that there was Hitler’s war and I was away from this country for six years.” He smiled at her. “You were a baby then.”

  “Yes, born 1940.”

  “So it’s all a historical novel to you. It was liberation to me, or it seemed so at the time. There was no more question of my living with my father and stepmother. Only what I did was to marry someone like them, the nice, pretty, well-brought-up daughter of one of Janet’s greatest friends. I was twenty-five. I was back from the war and she was there. In fact I made the same kind of marriage that my mother had made, only I didn’t get drowned after it.”

  “Of course not. You didn’t want to. You’re not the kind of person to die young. How are your children taking the divorce?”

  “It doesn’t make much difference to Shirley, she’s twenty-three, she’s got her job and her own flat and her friends. I think perhaps Tom minds more than he knows. I believe the children generally do. But he was always my boy; he’ll stay with me.”

  “Of course.” Flora, although she had known very little about Walter’s private life, had been aware as they all were of the very strong tie of affection between him and his son.

  “I can’t remember exactly how old Tom is now.”

  “Eighteen. He’s just got a place at Fordwick, that new university right up in Northumbrian’

  “Fordwick … oh.”

  “Why? Do you know anybody going there?”

  “I was talking the other day to someone who thought of applying for a job on the staff.”

  “Tom wouldn’t try for a place in an old university. He put in for East Anglia and Kent and Fordwick. Fordwick was what he got. I’m sorry myself; selfishly, I should have liked him to be nearer to London so that I might occasionally see him in term time. But he wanted Fordwick. He sees it as a perfectly clean slate to write his idea
s on.”

  “What are his ideas?”

  “Revolutionary but vague. No, abstract would be a better definition. He seems to be in love with a concept of pure revolution.”

  “We have those at St Frid’s too.”

  “Of course you do. The difference between what Tom thinks and what I thought at his age seems to be something like the difference between pure science and applied science. I had no abstract ideas. I don’t think I ever have had. I just hated Fascism, and wanted to hit it wherever I could. I still do, though I don’t see it nowadays under every policeman’s helmet. But when I was Tom’s age I was angry about definite things. Hitler and Mussolini, the conditions in this country that caused the hunger marches and so on. We had concrete enemies to fight against both at home and abroad.”

  “Who are Tom’s enemies?”

  “Anything that he thinks comes under the heading of Establishment. The monetary system of the world is one of his bogeys. Not sure that he understands it and it seems to be on its way out anyhow. He wants to make sweeping and wholesale reforms in a minute, but without violence. He’s very thorough and uncompromising in his notions, and very gentle and fair-minded in his personal relationships. It’s a hell of a world for them to grow up into, poor children.”

  Flora thought of telling him all about Nan but her own preoccupation with Hugh made it too much of an effort to start on a long story about somebody Walter had never heard of.

  “Tom can’t believe that anybody rich and powerful could be good. And goodness is what he’s really after.” “Is he religious?”

  “He wouldn’t have anything to do with any orthodox religion. They’re all in his view tainted by the Establishment. But I think he is essentially religious. He would have been at home as an early Christian. That complete unworldliness is endearing, though I don’t suppose it will last. Meanwhile the danger is that he may get used by people who are not at all unworldly, and when you find out that you have it’s a hell of a disillusionment.”