“That’s a very young chap teaching Marion to drive,” said Philip who worked at home all day, gossiped with the porters and knew everything that went on. “He doesn’t look any olden than she.”
“Really? She didn’t say.”
“Why should she? He won’t seem young to her.”
Geoffrey went up the steps. He had forgotten his key.
“Is my wife in, Jim?” he said to the head porter. “If not you’ll have to open up for me.”
“Mrs. Gilmour is in the garden, sir.”
“In the garden?”
“Yes, sir. Madam’s spent every day this week in the garden. The gardener’s no end pleased about it, I can tell you. He said to me only this morning, ‘The young lady’ — no disrespect, sir, but he called her the young lady — ‘really appreciates my garden, more than some others I could name.’ ”
“I don’t get it,” said Geoffrey as he and Philip went down into the square. “I really don’t. She promised me she wouldn’t go there again. I honestly do think she might keep the first promise she’s made to me. It’s a bit bloody much.”
Philip looked curiously at him. “Promised you she wouldn’t go into the garden? Why shouldn’t she?”
“Because I told her not to, that’s why.”
“My dear old Geoff, don’t get so angry. What’s come over you? I’ve never known you to get into such a state over a trifle.”
Through clenched teeth Geoffrey said, “I am not accustomed to being disobeyed,” but even as he spoke, as the alien words were ground out and Philip stood still, thunderstruck, he felt the anger that had overcome him without any apparent will of his own seep away, and he laughed rather awkwardly. “God, what a stupid thing to say! Marion!” he called. “I’m home.”
She had been sitting on the seat, a book on the table in front of her. But she hadn’t been reading it, for although it was open, the pages were fast becoming covered with fallen leaves. She turned a bemused face toward him, blank, almost hypnotized; but suddenly she seemed to regain consciousness. She picked up her book, scattered the leaves, and ran toward the gate.
“I shouldn’t have gone into the garden,” she said. “I didn’t mean to but it looked so lovely and I couldn’t resist. Wasn’t it funny that I couldn’t resist?”
He had meant to be gentle and loving, to tell her she was always free to do as she pleased. The idea that he might ever become paternalistic, let alone autocratic, horrified him. But how could she talk of being unable to resist as if there were something tempting about that drab autumnal place?
“I really don’t follow you,” he said. “It’s a mystery to me.” If tempered with a laugh, if accompanied by a squeeze of her hand, his words would have been harmless. But he heard them ring coldly and — worse — he felt glad his reproof had gone home, satisfied that she looked hurt and a little cowed. She sighed, giving the garden a backward glance in which there was something of yearning, something — was he imagining it? — of deceit. He took her arm firmly, trying to think of something that would clear the cloud from her face, but all that came out was a rather sharp, “Don’t let’s hang about here. We’re due at my cousin’s in an hour.”
She nodded compliantly. Instead of feeling remorse, he was irritated by the very quality that had captivated him, her childlike naivete. A deep and sullen depression enclosed him, and while they were at his cousin’s party he spoke roughly to her once or twice, annoyed because she sat silent and then, illogically, even more out of temper when she was stirred into a faint animation by the attentions of a boy her own age.
From that evening onward he found himself beginning to look for faults in her. Had she always been so vague, so dreamy? Had that idleness, that forgetfulness, always been there? She had ceased to speak of the garden. All those jaded leaves had fallen. The thready plane twigs hung bare, the evergreens had dulled to blackness, and often in the mornings the stone table, the seat, and the circle of grass were rimed with frost. The nights drew in at four o’clock and it was far too cold to sit in the open air.
Yet when he phoned his home from his office, as he had increasingly begun to do in the afternoons, he seldom received a reply. Nothing had come of that plan to go to classes and she said she never saw her friend. Where, then, was she when he phoned?
She couldn’t be having daily driving lessons, each one lasting for hours. He might have asked, her but he didn’t. He brooded instead on her absences and his suppressed resentment burst into flames when there was no dinner prepared for their guests.
“They’ll be here in three-quarters of an hour!” He had never shouted at her before and she put up her hand to her lips, shrinking away from him.
“Geoffrey, I don’t know what happened to me but I forgot. Please forgive me. Can’t we take them out?”
“People will begin to think I’ve married some sort of crazy child. What about last week when you ‘forgot’ that reception, when you ‘forgot’ to write and thank my cousin after we’d dined there?”
She had begun to cry.
“All right,” he said harshly, “we’ll take them to a restaurant. Haven’t much choice, have we? For God’s sake, get out of that bloody dress!”
She was again wearing the lilac muslin. Evening after evening when he got home he found her in it — the dress he had adored but which was now worn and crumpled, with a food spot at the waist.
He poured himself a stiff drink. He was shaking with anger. The arguments in her favor he had put forward when she forgot the reception — that there had been a dozen gatherings which she hadn’t forgotten but had graced — now seemed invalid m the face of this neglect.
But when she came back into the room his rage went. She wore a dress he hadn’t seen before, of scarlet silk, stiff and formal yet suited to her youth, with huge sleeves, a tight black and gold embroidered bodice, and long skirt. Her hair was piled high and she walked with an unfamiliar aloofness that was almost hauteur.
His rage went, to be replaced oddly and rather horribly by an emotion he hadn’t supposed he would ever feel toward her — a kind of greedy lust. He started forward, slopping his drink.
“Damme, Isabella, but you’re a fine woman!”
Incredulously, she stopped and stood still. “What did you say?”
He passed his hand across his brow. “I said, ‘God, Marion, you’re a lovely girl.’ ”
“I must have misheard you. I really thought... I feel so strange, Geoffrey, not myself at all sometimes and you’re not you. You do still love me?”
“Of course I love you. Kiss? That’s better. My darling little Marion, don’t look so sad, We’ll have a nice evening and forget all about this. Right?”
She nodded but her smile was watery, and the next day when he phoned her at three there was no reply, although she had told him her driving lesson was in the morning.
Philip looked very comfortable and at home in the armchair by the window, as if he had been there for hours. Perhaps he had. Was it possible that she was out with him, Geoffrey wondered, on all those occasions when he phoned and got no answer?
The dress he had come to hate was stained with mud at the hem as if she had been walking. Her shoes were damp and her hair untidy. Maybe she devoted her mornings to the “very young chap” and her afternoons to this much older one. The husband, he had always heard, was the last to know.
She sat down beside him on the sofa, very close, almost huddled with him. Geoffrey moved slightly aside. What had happened to her gracious ways, that virginal aloofness, which had so taken him when he first saw her in her father’s house? And he recalled, while Philip began on some tedious story of Palomede before the square was built, how he had ridden over to Cranstock to call on her father and she had been there with her mother in the drawing room, the gray-brown head and the smooth fair one bent over their work. At a word from her father she had risen, laying aside the embroidery frame, and played to them — oh, so sweetly! — on the harpsichord...