“Well, it’s my period. I’m steeped in it.”
Geoffrey got into his car. “How’s the new book coming?”
“Gone off to my publisher. Come round tonight and I’ll read you some bits?”
“No, you come to see us,” said Geoffrey, trying to sound enthusiastic. A jolly evening for Marion, he thought, a merry end to the day for an eighteen-year-old — coffee and brandy with a tired stockbroker of 35 and an historian of 45. He would ask her first thing he got back what she thought about it and if there were the least hesitancy in her manner, he would phone Philip and put him off.
“But I’d like to see him,” she said. “I love hearing about Victorian London. Stop worrying about me.”
“I expect I shall when we’ve settled in. What did you do today?”
“I went to Harrods and matched the stuff for the dining-room curtains and I arranged for my driving lessons. Oh, and I explored the garden.”
“The garden? Oh, that bit of jungle in the middle of the square.”
“Don’t be so disparaging. It’s a dear little garden. There are some lovely old trees and one of the porters told me they actually get squirrels in there. It’s been such a hot day and it was so quiet and peaceful sitting on the seat in the shade.”
“Quiet and peaceful!” he said.
She linked her arm through his and touched his cheek with one gentle finger. “I don’t want to be a gadabout all the time, Geoffrey, and I’ve never been very wild. Don’t you like me the way I am?”
He put his arms round her, emotion almost choking him. “I love everything about you. I must be the luckiest man in London.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” said Philip when, two hours later, Marion resumed her praises of the garden. “It is peaceful. I used to sit out there a lot last summer, working on my book, Great-Grandfather’s London. I’ve passed many a happy hour in that garden.”
“Yes, but you’re practically a great-grandfather yourself,” Geoffrey retorted. “I want Marion to go out with her contemporaries.”
“Very few of her contemporaries can afford to live in Palomede Square, Geoff. But I’m glad you like it, Marion. I’m thinking of writing a book about the square itself. I’ve unearthed some fascinating stories and a lot of famous people have lived here.” Philip named a poet, an explorer, and a statesman. “These houses were built in 1840 and I think that a hundred and thirty years of comings and goings ought to make a good read.”
“I’d like to hear some of those stories one day,” said Marion. In her long black skirt she looked like a schoolgirl dressed up for charades. She must get out and buy clothes, Geoffrey thought, spend a lot of money. He could afford it.
Philip had begun to read from his manuscript and during the pauses, while Marion asked questions, Geoffrey thought — perhaps because they had all been mentally transported back more than 100 years — of those Victorian dresses which were once more so fashionable for the very young. He imagined Marion in one of them, a ruched and flounced gown with a high, boned collar and long puff sleeves. In his mind’s eye he saw her as a reincarnation of a Nineteenth Century ingenue crossing the square, her blonde hair combed high, walking with delicate tread toward the garden.
Smiling at Philip, nodding to show he was still listening, he got up to draw the curtains. But before he pulled the cords, he looked out beyond the balcony to the empty square below with its lemony spots of lamplight and its neglected, leafy, umbrageous center. Between the canopy of the ilex and the dusty yellow-spotted laurel he made out the shape of the stone table and, beside it, the seat that looked as if it had never been occupied.
The corners of the garden were now deep caverns of shadow and nothing moved but a single leaf which, blown prematurely from the plane tree, scuttered across the sour green turf like some distracted insect.
He pulled the curtain cords sharply, wondering why he suddenly felt, in the company of his loved wife and his old friend, so ill at ease.
“How was your driving lesson, darling?”
“It was nice,” she said, smiling up at him with a kind of gleeful pride. “He said I was very good. When I came back I sat in the garden learning the Highway Code,”
“Why not sit on the balcony? If I’d been at home today I’d have sunbathed all afternoon on that balcony.”
She Said naively, “I do wish you could be home all day,” and then, as if feeling her way with caution, “I like the garden best.”
“But you don’t get any light there at all. It must be the gloomiest hole in London. As far as I can see, no one else uses it.”
“I’ll sit on the balcony if you want me to, Geoffrey. I won’t go in the garden if it upsets you.”
“Upsets me? What an extraordinary word to use! Of course it doesn’t upset me. But the summer’s nearly over and you might as well make the best of what’s left.”
While they had been speaking, standing by the windows which were open onto the balcony, she had been holding his arm. But he felt its warm pressure relax and when he looked down at her he saw that her face now had a vague and distant look, a look that was both remote and secretive, and her gaze had traveled beyond the balcony rail to the motionless treetops below.
For the first time since their wedding he felt rejected, left out of her thoughts. He took her face in his hand and kissed her lips.
“You look so beautiful in that dress — sprigged muslin, isn’t it? — like a Jane Austen girl going to her first ball. You didn’t wear that for your driving lesson?”
“No, I changed when I came in. I wanted to put it on before I went into the garden. Wasn’t that funny? I just had this feeling I ought to wear it for the garden.”
“I hoped,” he said, “you were wearing it for me.”
“Oh, darling,” she said, and now he felt that she was with him once more, “I can understand it upsets you when I go into the garden. I quite understand. I know it could affect some people like that. Isn’t it strange that I know? But I won’t go there again.”
He didn’t know what she meant or why his simple distaste for the place — a reasonable dislike that was apparently shared by the other tenants — should call for understanding. But he loved her too much to bother with it, and the vague unease he felt passed when she told him she had telephoned one of her bridesmaid friends and been invited to a gathering of young people. It gratified him that she was beginning to make a life of her own, planning to attend with this friend a course of classes. He took her out to dinner, proud of her in her flounced lilac muslin, exultant at the admiring glances she drew.
But he awoke in the night to strange terrors which he couldn’t at first define. She lay with one arm about his shoulders but he shook it off almost roughly and went quickly to get a glass of water as if, distressingly, mystifyingly, he must get away from her for a moment at all costs.
Sitting in the half-dark drawing room, he tried to analyze this night fear and came up with one short sentence: I am jealous. Never in his life had he been jealous before and the notion of jealousy had never touched their marriage. But now in the night, without cause, as the result of some forgotten dream perhaps, he was jealous. She was going to a party of young people, to classes with young people. Why had he never before considered that some of those contemporaries whom he encouraged her to associate with would necessarily be young men? And how could he, though rich, successful, though still young in a way, compete with a youth of twenty?
A sudden impulse came to him to draw back the curtains and look down into the garden, but he checked it and went back to bed. As he felt her, warm and loving beside him, his fears went and he slept.