Fleur thought: ‘Queer! How does he know Michael won’t be coming?’ And slipping into her well-warmed bed, she too curled herself up and slept.
But in the night, contrary to her custom, she awoke. A cry – long, weird, trailing, from somewhere – the river – the slums at the back – rousing memory – poignant, aching – of her honeymoon – Granada, its roofs below, jet, ivory, gold; the watchman’s cry, the lines in Jon’s letter:
Voice in the night crying, down in the old sleeping
Spanish City darkened under her white stars.
What says the voice – its clear, lingering anguish?
Just the watchman, telling his dateless tale of safety?
Just a road-man, flinging to the moon his song?
No! ‘Tis one deprived, whose lover’s heart is weeping,
Just his cry: ‘How long?’
A cry, or had she dreamed it? Jon, Wilfrid, Michael! No use to have a heart!
Chapter Four
DINING
LADY Alison Charwell, born Heathfield, daughter of the first Earl of Campden, and wife to Lionel Charwell, K.C., Michael’s somewhat young uncle, was a delightful Englishwoman brought up in a set accepted as the soul of society. Full of brains, energy, taste, money, and tinctured in its politico-legal ancestry by blue blood, this set was linked to, but apart from ‘Snooks’ and the duller haunts of birth and privilege. It was gay, charming, free-and-easy, and, according to Michael, ‘Snobbish, old thing, aesthetically and intellectually, but they’ll never see it. They think they’re the top notch – quick, healthy, up-to-date, well-bred, intelligent; they simply can’t imagine their equals. But you see their imagination is deficient. Their really creative energy would go into a pint pot. Look at their books – they’re always on something – philosophy, spiritualism, poetry, fishing, themselves; why, even their sonnets dry up before they’re twenty-five. They know everything – except mankind outside their own set. Oh! they work – they run the show – they have to; there’s no one else with their brains, and energy, and taste. But they run it round and round in their own blooming circle. It’s the world to them – and it might be worse. They’ve patented their own golden age; but it’s a trifle fly-blown since the war.’
Alison Charwell – in and of this world, so spryly soulful, debonaire, free, and cosy – lived within a stone’s throw of Fleur, in a house pleasant, architecturally, as any in London. Forty years old, she had three children and considerable beauty, wearing a little fine from mental and bodily activity. Something of an enthusiast, she was fond of Michael, in spite of his strange criticisms, so that his matrimonial venture had piqued her from the start. Fleur was dainty, had quick natural intelligence – this new niece was worth cultivation. But, though adaptable and assimilative, Fleur had remained curiously un-assimilated; she continued to whet the curiosity of Lady Alison, accustomed to the close borough of choice spirits, and finding a certain poignancy in contact with the New Age on Fleur’s copper floor. She met with an irreverence there, which, not taken too seriously, flipped her mind. On that floor she almost felt a back number. It was stimulating.
Receiving Fleur’s telephonic inquiry about Gurdon Minho, she had rung up the novelist. She knew him, if not well. Nobody seemed to know him well; amiable, polite, silent, rather dull and austere; but with a disconcerting smile, sometimes ironical, sometimes friendly. His books were now caustic, now sentimental. On both counts it was rather the fashion to run him down, though he still seemed to exist.
She rang him up. Would he come to a dinner tomorrow at her young nephew, Michael Mont’s, and meet the younger generation? His answer came, rather high-pitched:
‘Rather! Full fig, or dinner jacket?’
‘How awfully nice of you I they’ll be ever so pleased. Full fig, I believe. It’s the second anniversary of their wedding.’ She hung up the receiver with the thought: ‘He must be writing a book about them!’
Conscious of responsibility, she arrived early.
It was a grand night at her husband’s Inn, so that she brought nothing with her but the feeling of adventure, pleasant after a day spent in fluttering over the decision at ‘Snooks’. She was received only by Ting-a-ling, who had his back to the fire, and took no notice beyond a stare. Sitting down on the jade green settee, she said:
‘Well, you funny little creature, don’t you know me after all this time?’
Ting-a-ling’s black shiny gaze seemed saying: ‘You recur here, I know; most things recur. There is nothing new about the future.’
Lady Alison fell into a train of thought: The new generation! Did she want her own girls to be of it! She would like to talk to Mr Minho about that – they had had a very nice talk down at Beechgroves before the war.
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