Ankle Deep Page 11

  Mrs. Howard called out from her bedroom, as was her custom. Her erring daughter went in and found her reading in bed. “Have you had a nice time, darling,” said Mrs. Howard.

  “Yes, very. We had dinner and went to a cinema, and then went to a place for supper, which made us rather late.” Then she made her mother laugh by a brilliant description of the film. But of the walk around the square she said nothing. So Mrs. Howard went to sleep happy, and Aurea went to bed, but not to sleep, because when you are too tired you don’t sleep, and if you have been kissed there is a good deal to think about. She resented it, not because she minded Valentine having done it, but because it had been all on his side. If a kiss there had to be, it seemed very unfair that he should have all the fun of it. There was no fun in being kissed when you weren’t expecting it, and nothing to show for it but your hat and hair all untidy. Men had the unfair advantage that their hats and hair did not matter. Yet perhaps it was all just as well, for if one had been forewarned either one would have evaded it, or else one would have put one’s whole soul into it, and what then? Oh, if only one dared to put one’s whole soul into it. But one couldn’t. One would feel wicked afterwards, and it would upset mother and papa very much if they came to hear of it. As for Ned, the respectably married woman never thought of him once. All night long she lay awake, and no nearer deciding anything than she had been when she went to bed. Her last thought, before she fell into an uneasy sleep at dawn, was that if one were being judged by the kisses one had given or received, this one certainly wouldn’t count.

  Chapter 5

  After this shattering experience the unhappy pair tacitly agreed that evening meetings were too difficult. When everyone sits restraining him or her self, breathing hard, or looking swooningly imbecile, for four or five hours, the strain is too great. So they took to lunching together. Valentine would have liked to take her to expensive grills, but Aurea refused because she said he couldn’t afford it. Also she secretly rather hated Valentine to spend money on her. She would have liked always to be the giver, and then she had visions of him starving on bread and cheese in the evening if he had given her oysters and white wine for lunch, and this was unbearable. Common sense occasionally poked her head up, and told Aurea that if he could afford to take charmers out for the evening who expected much, surely he could take her out to lunch who expected little. But common sense was quickly pushed back into her hole. Besides, lunch saved one from the obvious dangers of taxis.

  About a week after the fatal evening Aurea arrived at five minutes to one at the pothouse chosen for that day’s lunch. She was always too early and Valentine, rather curiously, for it didn’t seem to be in keeping with the rest of his ways, was of meticulous punctuality. Aurea chose a table in a corner, and sitting down, she took out of her bag a piece of paper which she studied industriously, her lips moving from time to time as if she were rehearsing a speech. Precisely at one Valentine’s tall figure appeared at the door, and Aurea put her paper away. It was one of the drawbacks of love that it made one so blind. How true the poets are in all they say about that disturbing emotion; though Aurea’s blindness was a purely physical kind. To her idol’s many moral defects her eyes were perfectly open, but to his personal appearance they were sealed. She could never visualize him when they were apart, and when they met he always looked rather different from the Valentine she had tried to remember. It had always been the same with anything she really loved. Each year in spring she had vowed to look at the young green of the trees, the enameled hawthorn boughs, the dripping laburnum, the mist of bluebells, with such intensity that they would be stamped on her mind through all the year. Yet the more and the harder she looked, the more it seemed to her that she looked right through the earth’s beauty to something beyond. If the something had been a vision of an even lovelier spring, some green May morning in Paradise, it would have been worth while, but it definitely wasn’t. Nothing lovelier than an earthly spring could ever be, and it was most annoying that one’s eyes couldn’t look with enough concentration to make it one’s own forever. And so with Valentine, she always saw beyond him to some idea of her own, and try as she might, his visible form and face were never clear to her. When they had been separated, she thought it was even possible that, meeting again by chance, she would not know him, unless it were by his height, or a note in his voice. It is improbable that Valentine thought much about it one way or the other, not being given to introspection, and having a very sane conviction that what people had faces for was to recognize them by.

  Valentine began by telling Aurea about the bank rate for the day. Aurea felt herself growing more stupid and dumb every moment. It was really too awful to be a tongue-tied fool when one had so many million things to say.

  “I have something for you, Valentine,” she managed to say at last.

  “Angel, what?”

  “Oh, just a little snapshot of me that I found.”

  “You darling. I will put it very safely away with the others. Do you know where I keep them?”

  “No.”

  “Under my shirts,” said Valentine, in a proud voice, like a hen who has laid an egg in a secret place, “so that no one will see them.”

  This seemed to Aurea such a proof of chivalry and incarnation of romantic feeling that she nearly fainted. But, controlling herself, she looked long and devotedly at Valentine, trying to make out what his face was really like.

  “When you look at me like that you melt me,” said Valentine, and ate a very large mouthful of chop and drank a very large gulp of beer.

  Aurea fished in her bag and pulled out a small snapshot which she handed to Valentine. As she did so, the piece of paper which she had been studying fell on the floor. Valentine stooped and picked it up. “It is in your writing,” said he rapturously. “May I read it?”

  “Oh, yes, if you like.”

  Valentine looked at the paper. On it was written:

  Lecture.

  Fanny after?

  Horsham.

  Ch. letters.

  Bankers — pension?

  “What is it about, darling?” said he.

  “Things to talk about,” said Aurea, going bright red all over.

  “Darling, how lovely of you to look like that,” said the besotted gentleman, “but what sort of things?”

  Aurea looked as if she were going to cry, and then said in a choked voice, “I can’t ever talk to you, Valentine, because I love you so much, so I thought I’d write down some things to help me.”

  “Tell me some more about it,” said Valentine, very kindly, giving her back the paper.

  “Well,” said she, trying to pluck up courage and laugh a little, “you can’t think how difficult it is to talk when you are in love. So I wrote down some things that I thought might interest you, and then I could look at them from time to time when conversation flagged. First there is about a lecture that papa and I are going to this afternoon, and then we are going to tea with Fanny afterwards, and I thought you might perhaps drop in — it won’t be till late. And then I am going next weekend to some people near Horsham, and I thought we could talk about that a bit — I could ask you if you knew that part of Sussex, and you could say No, but you knew another bit. It all helps. And then I had some letters from the children, and I thought I could read extracts to you, and you could pretend to be amused. That was all, Valentine. Do you think it foolish?”

  “Dear darling,” said Valentine, adding, “What about bankers’ pensions? You had that on your list too.”

  Aurea looked as if the Inquisition were clutching at her. “Oh, it was only something that I thought might interest you. I was going to ask you if bankers got pensions, because I thought it would be nice for me to think when you were too old to work you had something to live on.”

  Valentine was so overpowered by this instance of loving thoughtfulness that he drank all his beer at one draught, and had to order some more.

  “I shall be quite all right when I retire,” he assured her. �
��I shall probably be a director, or a partner, or something, and live in luxury on ill-gotten gains.”

  “Oh, Valentine,” said Aurea, taken with a new idea, “when you retire couldn’t we go a tour of Europe together? It would be quite respectable then, and it would be such fun. You could do all the business part about hotels and things, and I would share the bills with vou.

  “Of course we will, only you shan’t pay a penny. It will be my present to you.”

  “Oh, thank you, thank you, Valentine. Is that a promise?”

  “Truth and honor,” said Valentine. But Aurea said to herself that it would never happen, though she loved Valentine for thinking of it while he still loved her.

  “And what about looking in at Fanny’s this afternoon, after your work?”

  “Of course I will. Not for long, because I’m going on to dine with some people. Darling, do you really find it so difficult to talk?”

  “If you ask me that with your conquering male voice,” said Aurea with sudden spirit, “I shall have no difficulty at all. Damn you, Valentine Ensor, don’t come your airs over me, and anyway it’s time you went back to your office. Shall I come with you on a bus?”

  So she did. And when they got out Valentine had to take her across the road to get her bus back to the other side, by which means they were enabled to stand arm in arm, blissfully close together, on an island, what time the policeman closed and opened the sluice gates of traffic four times. Which was quite an unnecessary waste of time.

  Aurea was to meet her father at a learned society which gave lectures on Wednesday afternoons at half-past three. She got there a little before the time, and was directed to go upstairs. The society was not rich enough to have rooms of its own, so it borrowed the rooms of the Independent Union of Clerical Teachers. The lecture room was paneled in pitch pine below and distempered sage green above. On the walls hung enlarged photographs of members of the Union, all full of zeal, with the corners of their mouths inhumanly drawn down and their Adam’s apples sticking out over their collars. The chairs for the audience had fat leather seats which looked as if hundreds of cats spent their leisure in sharpening their claws on them. Aurea took a seat at one side, and surveyed the early arrivals who were mostly of the female sex. Two or three incredibly hideous elderly ladies, with enormous features surmounted by plumed hats, sat together, sharing a railway rug. A number of earnest middle-aged women had notebooks. Here and there were a few elderly men whose dusty shoulders and crumb-sprinkled waistcoats proclaimed them to be scholars. One of these pounced on Aurea and inquired if it was her father that was lecturing. She said no, but he was taking the chair.

  “And is your father engaged on any work at present?” asked the scholarly man, whom Aurea suspected of being the very boring Professor Osgood, but didn’t dare to address by that name in case she were wrong.

  “Well, he is always doing something,” said Aurea vaguely, “but he isn’t doing anything very special at the moment.”

  “Nothing more on Polybius, ah-ha?” said the possible Professor Osgood. As Mr. Howard had recently published an edition of Polybius, embodying the work of a lifetime, it was hardly probable that he would immediately produce another book on the same subject, but Aurea just said she thought not.

  “I saw your father not so long ago at the dinner of the Milton Society, where our old friend Bennington was speaking. You wouldn’t know Bennington. He very rarely leaves Cambridge, unless it is to come up to town and see his widowed sister-in-law,” said the putative Osgood.

  “Oh, yes,” said Aurea, “I believe he did go,” and felt that she wasn’t shining. Luckily at this moment a snag in a bottle-green coat-frock trimmed with lace braces came up, and disentangling her eyeglasses from some embroidery, begged Professor Bolton’s pardon, but Dr. Alice Jupp would so much like to meet him. The professor followed obediently, and a just judgment fell upon him for being so dull, for he was thrown alive into the jaws of Dr. Jupp, an American lady in a tartan mackintosh, who had just written a book on Gray, which consisted entirely in rewriting his letters in oratio obliqua, occasionally adding, “Gray may well have thought…” or, “we may imagine Gray’s sensitive mind…” For this piece of research or, as it was called in the university which gave her a degree, re-search, she had been made a doctor, and enjoyed it very much. Aurea was thankful that she hadn’t addressed the professor as Osgood.

  Then her father came in with the lecturer, whom he introduced with great charm. The lecturer, poor young man, had been working in the British School at Rome, and imagined that he was going to create the classical and literary event of the year by lecturing to the learned society. If he had been older and more experienced, he would have known that lectures, especially afternoon ones, are attended almost exclusively by women. If he had been younger, he would have remembered what women students at Oxford were like, and not expected any intelligence or humor from his audience. Aurea felt heartily sorry for him as he ploughed his way through his lecture to rows of earnest female faces. She did her best to help him by laughing at his jokes, but it was a hollow sham when no one supported her. Women students don’t think that a serious lecturer would do anything so silly as to make a joke, so they aren’t prepared with their bright sense of humor. While he spoke they sat grim and motionless, unless he happened to mention a date, when they all hurriedly took it down. Professor Bolton, I regret to say, sniffed all the time, and the hideous elderly women stared unblinkingly while the lecturer fumbled his way along for an hour and a quarter. Mr. Howard moved a vote of thanks in as few words as possible, and was seconded at infinite length by Professor Bolton, who took occasion to try out some very dull anecdotes of Oxford in the seventies, the chief point of which seemed to be that everyone was very rude to each other, and someone made a witty little poem about it, which he could not quite remember. After this, Dr. Jupp descended upon the lecturer, and petrified him to that extent that he consented, quite against his better judgment, to go back to her hotel for tea and meet two very rare and cultivated women whose acquaintance she had made on the boat coming over.

  “There, papa, that’s done,” said Aurea, taking her father downstairs. “Shall we walk to Fanny’s and get some fresh air?” Mr. Howard was quite agreeable.

  “I was sorry for the poor little lecturer,” said Aurea, when they got out of the noisy street into the comparative quiet of the park.

  “I can’t think why I consented to take the chair,” said Mr. Howard. “I ought to have known better. First that young man who, although I must say he knows his subject very well, spoke for seventy-five minutes, which is unpardonable, and then that old ass Bolton with his stories. A silly scholar is a most humiliating sight, and very mortifying to those who have to listen to him.”

  “At least, papa, you were spared Dr. Jupp.”

  “Dr. Who? Oh, the American woman. Doctor, indeed! They all buy their degrees for ten dollars,” said Mr. Howard, unjustly.

  “Oh, papa, she might be honest. I expect she is just Ph.D. That’s the easiest sort, isn’t it?”

  “H-dee?”

  Aurea explained. “But you might be kinder to the young man, papa. He was doing his best, and I expect he was all flustered with you being there.”

  This not very subtle flattery produced its effect, and Mr. Howard smiled grimly, saying, “I will say for him that he had the root of matter in him, though he still has much to learn. I certainly must get out to Rome myself and see what is being done. Perhaps in the autumn.”

  “Are those the excavations Valentine was telling you about?” said Aurea, finding great difficulty in saying the beloved name.

  “Valentine?” said Mr. Howard, who had an annoying habit of repeating one’s statements as a query, thus putting one hopelessly into the wrong.

  “Yes, Valentine Ensor, you know, papa. He was in Rome last autumn and saw them, and he was going to tell you all about them that night we went to the Sinclairs party, only you had that frightful cold and mother sent you to bed. Don’t register
denseness, papa.”

  “Ha, yes, Ensor. I like that young man.”

  “Which young man, papa? The lecturer?”

  “I think it is you who are registering denseness now,” said Mr. Howard disconcertingly. “I mean your friend Mr. Ensor. You see a good deal of him, don’t you?”

  This was more disconcerting than ever. Could it be possible that papa, who never noticed what was going on, and indeed drove everybody mad with irritation by his habit of plunging uninvited into the middle of conversations to which he had no clue, and wanting to know what it was all about; could it be that papa was noticing that she and Valentine were in love? That would be dreadful. He was quite capable of suddenly becoming a Victorian father and forbidding Valentine the house. That would be the right expression. Not that it would make any difference, as one just took no notice of the blessed darling when he came the heavy father. It was very funny, thought Aurea, how one’s parents never thought of one as grown-up. Mother still threw fits, as Aurea inelegantly expressed it to herself, if her daughter was home late from a dinner party, or even a tea party. And as for papa he had absolutely no sense of fitness where young men were concerned, and could be confidently counted upon to descend benignly upon Aurea’s tea parties and paralyze conversation. And, even more annoying, would stay on, showing every outward sign of boredom, till the young men were driven away, and then wonder why they went so soon. But he was such a darling that one couldn’t be angry. Now he seemed to be upon his hind legs — again his daughter’s way of putting it — about Valentine. It was largely her own fault, she admitted, for mentioning his name at all, but heaven knows what the temptation was to say that dearest of names aloud, even if one got oneself into trouble by it. Mother had been successfully sidetracked, so that she did not worry if Aurea was out with Valentine. Papa must be headed off now.