The Light Heart (33 page)

“Oh, how
good
it is to be with you again!” she said
impulsively
, and his arm tightened as they made a swinging, exultant turn at the edge of the floor, and she felt his breath on her cheek.

“May I see you?” he murmured under the music.

“How?” she said hopelessly. “Where?”

“I don’t know. No harm in asking. Couldn’t we have lunch or tea somewhere?”

“Alone? We’d be seen. Somebody would run and tell her.”

“Probably. Would you mind?”

“I was thinking of you, mostly.”

“Oh, I’m used to it, you know,” he said without rancour.

“Is she here to-night?”

“Dancing with Charles just now.” He nodded across the floor and turned so that Phoebe looked that way.

Charles was not hard to spot. The woman in his arms was slender and danced easily. Her dark hair was parted and piled into heavy coils high at the back of her head, with a silver filet across it. Her eyes were long and narrow and set at an upward angle. Her skin was sallow and thick, and her mouth was small and would have been the better for a touch of rouge. But the whole effect of her, at that distance, was one of great elegance amounting to beauty.

“She’s charming,” Phoebe said hastily.

“She can be,” said Oliver without much expression, and added in a deliberately impersonal tone, “She likes Charles. Makes it awkward, because I know he’s never been able to stick her.”

“He seems to be getting along all right.”

“Oh, yes, they learn manners in the Guards! As a matter of fact, he timed this rather well, didn’t he,” Oliver remarked, amused, and laughed when her eyes came back to him in surprise. “Good old Charles!” he said. “He wasn’t born yesterday!”

There was an edge to the laugh and the tone which had not been there once. Phoebe plunged.

“Oliver, is it as bad as Virginia says?”

“Knowing Virginia, probably not. But it’s not very good, all the same.”

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

“Well, I tried,” he said ruefully, and the music stopped. “Come and be introduced.”

Maia and Charles saw them, and stood waiting at the side of the room. Reptilian, thought Phoebe involuntarily, with her dreadful facility for the right word, as she met Maia’s direct look—her eyes are like a lizard’s.

But Maia’s lips were smiling, as she acknowledged the introduction.

“Oh, you are the one who writes books. I’ve heard a great deal about you from Oliver’s family.” Her voice was thin and pinched like her mouth, with artificial vowels. “I always thought it was odd we didn’t meet the last time you were in England.”

“I wasn’t here long,” Phoebe said casually. “You were off in the country somewhere, I think.”

“With my poor father,” Maia nodded. “Just think, we were convinced he was dying then, and now he’s being very hearty and enjoying life with his second wife!”

“That’s good,” said Phoebe, and suspected that Oliver’s lips
twitched, and fought for safe footing on very brittle ice. “I think people ought to marry again if they’re lonely, don’t you?”

“It’s rather an odd thing to say, when you haven’t married even once yourself,” said Maia with a measuring glance which questioned Phoebe’s spinsterhood. “The next dance is ours, Oliver. Could you find me a glass of water before it starts?” She laid her hand on his arm, but Oliver stood like a rock.

“Are you all booked up?” he asked Phoebe. “How about an extra later on?”

She promised him the last extra before supper, and he walked away with Maia, smiling back over his shoulder.

“See what I mean?” said Charles grimly. “Let’s sit this one out and recover, or is someone going to take you away from me?’

“It’s Archie,” she said, glancing at her card.

“Oh, good. Let’s find him
and
the punch!”

Which they did, amongst mutual congratulations that it had been no worse. “Wait,” said Archie darkly, when he heard about the extra.

“But she
looks
all right,” Phoebe insisted as the three of them sat together under a potted palm on what Archie had hailed as the mourners’ bench. “Surely you’re all dreaming. There’s nothing wrong with her.”

“Oh, we don’t say she goes for him with the carving-knife,” said Archie, being fair, and then he frowned. “All the same, the seed of madness is there,” he muttered.

“Archie, don’t be
gruesome!
” cried Phoebe in horror.

“Well, dash it all, he’s my brother. It’s a nasty thing to have going on in the family.”

Virginia sailed up then with Lady Shadwell’s nephew, who would be the Earl of Nutfield one day, and who doted on Americans, according to Virginia, so Phoebe had to find him a dance, and the mourners’ bench broke up.

The evening fled away and Phoebe was surrounded and the more she saw of Maia in her silver filet and white crêpe de chine gown sewn with silver bugles, dancing and chatting with
other men besides Oliver, the harder it became for Phoebe to believe that there were women in London who preferred not to risk a dance with Oliver, and who begged their hostesses not to put him next to them at dinner for fear of Maia’s tongue—and the surer she became that somebody was dreaming.

When the supper time extra came round, Oliver appeared at her side looking as though he hadn’t a care in the world, and led her away to where the noble staircase curved upward, red-carpeted and lined with potted flowering plants and palms, and dotted with chatting couples who were sitting out.

“These cosy little cushions on the stairs must mean that Winifred has got Rosa Lewis in charge of the party,” he remarked settling Phoebe under a palm out of hearing of the next pair. “Which also means that supper will be superb.” He sat down beside her with a sigh of happy accomplishment. “Now. When can I see you?”

“I suppose we could always go back to the Tate,” she said, only half in earnest, and he laughed.

“I could lead you round it blindfold,” he said.

“Oh, Oliver, have you really been there again?” Her eyelids stung with tears.

“Again and again! I told you I would. They have got some rather nice additions since the time we saw it together.”

“I suppose I
could
meet you there—feeling awfully guilty and clandestine,” she said uncertainly.

“And enjoying it, rather?”

“No.” She shook her head. “Not the clandestine part. It doesn’t go with you. I’d rather flaunt you!”

“I believe you would, too,” he said, as though such a thing as a woman proud to show that she was in love was a new idea to him. “Well, I’ve only got tomorrow, this trip. Three o’clock?”

“Yes. If you’re sure it’s all right.”

“Quite sure,” he smiled, and she saw that he must have kept some sort of life of his own—the club—the War Office—the bachelor chambers of people like Charles—where Maia could not intrude.

They were still sitting on the little cushions on the stairs and Phoebe was promising to go to Egypt some day and think of him, for he was always in love with the desert, when they became aware that the music had stopped and Charles was mounting the stairs towards them.

“Supper,” he announced. “Hurry up, old boy, Maia’s just sitting down and you’re being paged.”

Oliver went lightly down the steps with no visible ill-humour at the summons, and Phoebe followed with Charles to
Virginia’s
table. Along about the third dance after supper, when Phoebe was just setting out with Edward on a one-step, she was surprised to find Oliver at their elbows.

“Be a good chap, and let me have this one,” he said, and Edward surrendered his partner with a look which washed his hands of the consequences. They danced it almost in silence, and she was very much aware of Oliver’s guiding arm and the way his breath came and went, and the crisp perfection, even at the end of the evening, of his white shirt-front and tie, while Oliver decided that it was lilacs she smelled of.

The music ended when they were near the door to the
staircase
hall and they drifted out, away from the dance floor, her right hand still in his left. Maia had just reached the bottom of the stairs, wrapped in a silver brocade and ermine cloak which set off her dark hair but made her untouched-up skin muddy and dull.

Oliver went straight up to her.

“I didn’t know you were ready to go,” he said. “I’ll get my coat.”

“Please don’t trouble,” Maia said, her face a mask of
composed
fury. “The motor is waiting to take me home.” She turned to pass him, and he laid his hand on the fur over her arm.

“I won’t be a sec,” he said, and ran up the stairs.

She did not glance his way. Her eyes rested on Phoebe, who stood helplessly where Oliver had left her, unable even to attempt to escape now that the thing had begun to happen just as they all said it would.

“Perhaps you will see fit eventually to return my
impressionable
husband to me, Miss Sprague,” Maia said, and her thin voice carried in the silence the music had left, as people filtered out into the hall to change partners and find places to sit out the next dance. “You may tell him that the motor has gone. I see no necessity to keep the chauffeur hanging about all night while Oliver amuses himself.”

“Oh, Lord, here we go again,” murmured Archie at Phoebe’s side, but Maia left it at that and swept past them towards the door.

“Damn,” said Phoebe without heat. “Oh, damn and blast. I was going to be so careful.”

T
HEY
spent an hour or more at the Tate the following
afternoon
, most of the time sitting on a bench and talking absorbedly of what had happened to them in the years between. When he returned to England from foreign service Oliver had collected all of Phoebe’s books and read them hungrily, distilling out of them what he could of her growing, changing personality, wondering anew in his soldier’s way at her minute and
embarrassing
knowledge of what went on inside people, and at the easy, amusing way the people she wrote about conversed together, just as you could hear people anywhere in a room only a little better, he would tell himself in perpetual
astonishment
that she could do it. At the same time he received from Virginia a very decided impression of success.

Now Phoebe sketched in some of the gaps for him, not consciously holding back anything, and came to the Coronation offer from the women’s magazine and how she had refused it, she thought with wisdom, and gone firmly to Germany instead, and how Providence in the shape of Bracken in New York had caught up with her at Heidersdorf. When she told about what it was like at the
Schloss
he listened attentively but
without Charles’s pinpoint concentration. And if Phoebe did most of the talking it was because there was so much behind Oliver that would not bear talking about, and most of it was expressed in the way his body leaned to her as they sat on the hard oak bench, the way his eyes clung to her face, the way he listened and made her go on.

Phoebe watched him lovingly as she talked, and thought how little he had changed, though his eyes showed weariness as Virginia had said, and his dark hair was streaked with grey at the edges. And she thought, He’s nearly forty—half his life gone, and I have had so little of it. She thought, What is it about this one man that holds me fast to him for ever? And his quick laughter answered her, responding to something she hardly knew she had said, and his brilliant eyes caressing her face as he listened, and the lean, alert look of him on the hard bench, and the curve of his upper lip beneath the clipped moustache…. He was Oliver. He was good to be with, he was fun to talk to, he knew what she meant, he thought she was funny and beautiful and desirable, he made her feel like a queen. He was the only one she loved, because he had something inside him none of the others had—something quick and tender and acute, something light and keen and perceptive, something kind and uncritical and cradling, that closed round her like arms, and lifted. Oh,
Oliver
…

Then it was time for them to go. Oliver looked at his watch and glanced round the deserted gallery, from which even the attendant in a peaked cap had for the moment receded. She had taken off her gloves while they sat there, and now she began to put them on again. Oliver caught her left hand and held it to his lips—she felt them move against her fingers, and the prick of his moustache.

“There aren’t words to say what it’s meant to me today,” he said quietly, “or how glad I am that things are going well with you.”

“They aren’t, particularly,” she confessed, looking at him through hot, sudden tears. “Not in any way that matters much.”

“My dear, you must make some kind of life—I suppose I should tell you to forget me.”

“I’ve tried,” she told him with trembling lips.

“You must try again.”

She shook her head, looking down at her gloves, and bright tears fell on them as she tugged them into place.

“But, Phoebe, you were made for life, not a nunnery!”

“I don’t exactly live in a nunnery in New York—I have friends, I—even get proposed to sometimes. If I always say No, that’s my own lookout.” On a final effort she conquered her tears and looked him in the face with a rather twisted smile. “We’re all going down to Farthingale with Virginia after Goodwood. Shall I see you there?”

“Oh, yes. I shall be at the Hall sometime in August.”

“Once more, then, before I go home.”

“Once more, anyway. This isn’t good-bye.”

They rose. He was going to be late for tea in Belgrave Square.

S
USSEX
W
EEK
was hot and they all wore their prettiest dresses, and then everyone retired to houses in the country with
expressions
of relief.

Rosalind and Prince Conrad went to visit her sister Evelyn in Surrey, and then to Dorset, from where Rosalind wrote to ask if they might come to Farthingale a little later than they had planned, as they were now invited to visit a famous house near Oxford which Conny was anxious to see and they had to get it in before the grouse shooting began.

Virginia puckered up her brows, because that would bring them there the same week that Charles and the Chetwynds were coming, and while it wouldn’t have mattered if they lapped over a day or two, and there was plenty of room, and it would be rather like old times again—she did wonder just a bit how Prince Conrad would fit in for the whole week. Then she
thought of Selma Gluckston, of whom she did not approve and who was never invited to Farthingale, and wondered just how deeply Charles was getting involved with Selma, and if it mightn’t be a good idea to cure him once and for all, just in case. And taking care not to consult Archie until it was too late, Virginia wrote back to Rosalind urging them to come just when it was most convenient, and not mentioning who else would be there the same week.