An Aspidistra in Babylon Read online

  I suggested that evening, perhaps about six, and he said:

  ‘Admirable. Couldn’t be better. I’ll trot along then.’

  He turned to go and then suddenly paused at the open door of the hallway. The smell of sea and seaweed was very strong in the hot calm air and the brass curb of the doorstep shone like a strip of fire. A channel steamer coming in stern first across the harbour was making smoke and the cloud of it was the only blemish on the blinding purity of the day.

  ‘I do hope we can fix things up,’ he said. ‘Sort of duty to see that she’s all right, if you know what I mean. I’m her only relative. Must do the best for her.’

  He flashed another winning blue signal at me with those remarkable eyes of his and then stared at the steamer crossing the harbour, at the same time giving the briefest sigh.

  ‘What a day to be crossing. What a thought, eh? Get the Blue Train from Paris tonight and in Nice tomorrow. What about that?’

  The fact that the question was purely rhetorical didn’t prevent my saying an abysmally stupid thing.

  ‘I don’t know. Where’s Nice?’ I said.

  He was quick to seize on this piece of idiotic innocence of mine and said:

  ‘You’ve never heard of Nice? Now that I just won’t believe.’

  ‘Truly,’ I said.

  ‘Just won’t, just can’t and just don’t believe.’

  Suddenly, for the second time, I felt myself flushing and once again I was completely hypnotised by that remarkably charming, iridescent stare of his.

  ‘Just isn’t possible,’ he said. ‘You’re pulling my leg.’

  ‘Oh! but it is,’ I assured him. ‘It is. I wouldn’t dream of saying something I didn’t mean.’

  Perhaps it sounds a little exaggerated but that intensely naïve remark of mine was perhaps the most important thing I ever said to Captain Blaine. If I had stripped myself stark naked on the doorstep in the blinding sunshine I could hardly have revealed more of myself to him.

  ‘I suppose you’ve been there very often?’ I said. ‘Is it wonderful?’

  ‘Practically lived there before the war. Couldn’t tear myself away. Wine three francs a bottle. Wonderful? It’s divine. It’s celestial. If you can imagine heaven mating with paradise Nice would be their daughter.’

  This slightly extravagant turn of phrase both amused and captivated me. I laughed aloud.

  ‘It sounds marvellous,’ I said. ‘I shall have to start saving all my pennies and get there.’

  ‘Ah! the pennies, the pennies,’ he said. He actually gave me a brief, reassuring, friendly pinch on the arm. ‘The pennies. You’ve hit it now, girl. There’s the rub. Plenty of pennies, that’s the snag. That’s the form. That’s what you must have.’

  He gave an almost sorrowful shake of the head, at the same time chuckling again. A moment later he put on his cap, shook me by the hand and saluted.

  ‘Goodbye. Charmed to meet you. Back at six.’

  He crossed the road to where a small dark red coupé was parked in the blazing sun and I stood for a minute longer at the doorway, watching him crank it up, get into it and, after a careless wave of the hand to me, drive it away.

  As it disappeared along the promenade that old trick of light played itself on me again. But this time I was more than dazzled by it. For quite some seconds I was almost blind.

  Of course it just isn’t possible to capture an entire personality in one short meeting, however much you may delude yourself you may have done so, and my experience with Captain Blaine that afternoon was very comparable to what I have at times experienced with certain kinds of flowers.

  I am referring more particularly to flowers that are strongly perfumed: carnations, roses, lilies and so on. My experience has often been that in the first rapturous moment of burying your face in their petals you really seem to drink in perfume in one great exquisite liquid draught. But only a few seconds later, when you seek to repeat the experience, you are doomed to disappointment. For some reason the perfume is no longer there. In that first eager rush of thirst you seem to have drained the petals dry. The flower is temporarily exhausted. The scent is dead.

  This was very much my experience with Captain Blaine at our second meeting that day. All that hot afternoon the air was full of Captain Blaine. I suppose I must have sat in the sitting room until nearly six o’clock, trying as I so often did to read verse and yet never managing to focus a single line, and all the time I was as powerfully and keenly aware of his presence as if the room had been full of flowers. In the hot June quietness I kept drinking and drinking him in.

  Perhaps I’m not putting all this in the best possible way, but what I am trying to say is that I wanted to repeat that first delicious and exciting experience in exactly its original form when Captain Blaine came back at six o’clock. I wanted, as with a flower, to re-experience that first divine deep drink at the perfume.

  And, as with a flower, I was disappointed.

  There may have been several reasons for this. In the first place Captain Blaine was very late in arriving. It was in fact nearly eight o’clock before he arrived. This, as I later discovered, was quite typical of him and afterwards it never surprised me.

  In the second place he was slightly drunk. This, in my innocence, I didn’t appreciate at the time and quite understandably, since when Archie Blaine was drunk it was never in a disgusting, obvious, tedious way but only when an apparent stiffening up of the entire muscular system, so that he looked if anything more correct than ever.

  The third reason, I think, was the presence of my mother. As I have tried to indicate she always made me feel not merely something other than myself but something very much less than myself. And that evening I not only felt her influence very strongly. I was effaced; I simply wasn’t there. And as a result Captain Blaine hardly took the trouble to look or speak to me.

  ‘My aunt, Miss Charlesworth,’ he explained to my mother—it simply didn’t occur to him to apologise for being late, for the simple reason that he was one of those people to whom time, especially other people’s time, means absolutely nothing—‘is asthmatical. Not chronically bad, you understand. But occasionally it brings on bronchial relapses. It’s hard on the ticker.’

  Most of the time I kept watching those captivating iridescent eyes of his, waiting for a sign of recognition and all the while totally unaware of the reason for their inability to focus me.

  ‘She needs quiet and a dry climate. That’s why I want to get her here. And particularly in your boarding house, because it’s at the quiet end of the promenade and she has the lawns and the gardens just opposite. She can be really quiet here.’

  ‘Would she need extra attention, any nursing or anything of that kind?’ my mother asked.

  ‘None whatever. None whatever. Absolutely none. Perfectly capable of looking after herself. It’s just the occasional bronchial threat, that’s all. Otherwise she’ll be perfectly content to do her reading, her bit of crochet and so on. And two or three afternoons a week I’ll run her along the coast in the car.’

  There was of course nothing very difficult or complicated about all this and soon my mother and Captain Blaine were fixing terms. Miss Charlesworth would arrive during the following week-end. He would meet her at the station. And if all went well she would stay for at least the rest of the summer and perhaps much longer.

  ‘Goodnight, madam, and thank you,’ he said to my mother, ‘most awfully obliged,’ and at last departed with that over-stiff bearing of his that had me utterly and completely fooled.

  There was a great sickening stupid lump in my throat when he had gone but somehow I managed to say:

  ‘What did you think of him? Did you like him?’

  ‘He talks too much,’ my mother said. That was all. ‘He talks too much.’

  An awful sort of cold blackness came over me. If my mother had said outright, in the plainest and most unequivocal of terms, that she thought Captain Blaine was nothing more than an evil and corrupting influence I couldn’t have been more outraged. I just turned and rushed madly upstairs and lay there for the rest of the evening in the bed, beating my hands in dark hatred on the counterpane.

  Women, nevertheless, have strange intuitions about men. They possess an uncanny curious sixth sense about them. They also have, of course, their blindnesses and that day my mother divined something about Captain Blaine that it took me almost the rest of that year to discover.

  Where I had detected in the air, in my thirsty adolescent eagerness, only perfumes and charms and iridescence, only the dazzle of summer, my mother had already seen a cloud.

  3

  Miss Charlesworth duly arrived on the following Saturday afternoon, dutifully fetched from the station by Captain Blaine in the little red coupé.

  ‘Bertie dear,’ was Captain Blaine’s affectionate way of addressing her. ‘Bertie dear.’

  She was a tallish, rather angular woman of seventy whose face, under its crimped white hair, had the appearance of being made of pinkish-mauve enamel that had got rather dusty. She was in fact very much over-powdered, just as she was also very much over-dressed, in a very lacy kind of way, and over-jewelled and over-trunked.

  In all I think she brought with her seven or eight large travelling trunks that day. She also had a great deal of subsidiary paraphernalia in the way of parasols, umbrellas, walking sticks, clocks, reticules, sewing-bags, jewel cases and that sort of thing. I fully expected her also to produce either pince-nez or lorgnettes or both, but in fact she did nothing of the kind, and for a very good reason.

  Her large grey eyes were as sharp and apparently youthful as my own. She had no need of glasses.

  Ruby, who had a quick knack of summing-up the foibles, oddities and shortcomings of guests both male and female, at once called her the Duchess.

  ‘Couldn’t have more clothes, anyway, duckie, even if she was,’ she said to me. ‘Twenty-three dresses I counted in the wardrobe this morning. And four jewel cases. Worth a bob or two I should say.’

  It duly became apparent, as Captain Blaine had suggested, that Miss Charlesworth, for all her appearance of excessive fussiness, was going to be, as a guest, of little or no bother to us. She clearly belonged to that race of gentlefolk who, though never having to work, are highly self-sufficient. They are monuments of busyness.

  Miss Charlesworth in fact, read a great deal, crocheted and knitted a great deal, played patience a great deal and wrote, every morning between eleven and one, great quantities of letters.

  It was one of these letters that brought me my next meeting with Captain Blaine. One brilliant morning in early July Miss Charlesworth rang the bell in the writing-room and asked the answering parlourmaid if she could see my mother.

  ‘I’m most anxious to get a note to my nephew at the garrison,’ she explained, ‘and I wondered if one of the maids could take it.’

  My mother, apologising, proceeded to explain that it was exceedingly difficult to spare one of the girls at that time of day and why didn’t Miss Charlesworth telephone?

  The answer was typical.

  ‘I dislike telephones,’ Miss Charlesworth said. ‘In fact I distrust them. They lack privacy. What I have to say to Captain Blaine is confidential.’

  At this moment I went past the writing-room door on my way to the kitchen and it prompted my mother to say:

  ‘I’m sure Christine would take it, however. Wouldn’t you, Christine? A note for Captain Blaine?’

  ‘Deliver it to him personally, child,’ Miss Charlesworth said. ‘Personally. Remember—I trust you.’

  As I walked up the long curving road to the castle just after two o’clock that afternoon it was very hot. The high, white cliffs glared with an almost savage light above the sea and although I had put on the coolest and lightest of dresses, a simple pale cream shantung, I felt awfully nervous and clammy. I was nervous because I could foresee some difficulty in finding Captain Blaine, for the simple reason that although from a distance the castle looks no more than a single solid block of masonry it is in fact almost a little town. It is a positive labyrinth up there of streets, squares, terraces of houses, quarters, stables, armouries and heaven knows what.

  And then, almost at the top of the hill, when I was already within sight of the sentry boxes at the gates, I had a stroke of luck. I heard a car changing gear on the hill behind me and when I turned to look at it I saw that familiar dark red coupé, with the hood down, and in it Captain Blaine.

  As it went past me I waved Miss Charlesworth’s envelope and shouted. Twenty yards farther on the car stopped and I started running.

  Even on the hottest days there is always an uplift of breeze on that hill and as I ran forward a sudden light whirl of wind caught at my big-brimmed white straw hat and lifted the shantung skirt above my knees.

  I was still trying to hold down hat and skirt when I reached Captain Blaine, who stared at me with those iridescent eyes dancing with astonishment.

  ‘Good God, girl, I didn’t know you.’

  ‘I’ve got a note for you,’ I said, panting slightly, ‘from Miss Charlesworth.’

  ‘Awfully, awfully sorry,’ he said. ‘Really didn’t know you. You look different somehow.’

  I was foolish enough, believe it or not, to ask ‘How?’

  ‘Don’t know.’ He sat there in the driving seat looking at me quizzically, all charm. ‘Must be the dress. No it isn’t. I know. It’s the hat. I’ve never seen you in a hat before.’

  I flushed. It’s always the little things that get women. It’s always the stupid little trivialities that trap them.

  ‘Makes you look older. More mature.’

  ‘Oh! really?’

  As if he hadn’t already said enough to have me in helpless enslavement he suddenly smiled and said, with bland exchantment:

  ‘You suit the day. You look like a bit of sunlight blown up from the sea.’

  Could any girl, I ask you, want more than that? I lapped up these blandishments as a kitten laps up warm new milk.

  ‘Oh! the note,’ I said, giggling slightly. ‘I was forgetting the note. It was a bit of luck seeing you like this. Miss Charlesworth said to be sure to give you the note personally. She trusted me to do that, she said.’

  A sharp change came over his face. He even ignored the note in his penetrating eagerness to make quite sure what I had said.

  ‘She said what?’

  ‘She said she trusted me.’

  A smile crept back so slowly to his face that its final rest there gave it a look of quite innocent astonishment.

  ‘Do you know you’ve just said something very remarkable?’ he said.

  ‘Me?’ I said and I giggled nervously again. ‘How?’

  ‘My aunt has never trusted anyone in her life,’ he said. ‘Not a soul.’

  By this time he had put the note in his pocket and I stood there for some seconds with nothing to say, aware only of the sun flashing on the bonnet of the car, his tunic buttons and far below us on the surface of the sea.

  ‘You saw all that paraphernalia she brought?’ he said. ‘That’s an example of how little she trusts people. That’s her all, in those damn trunks. Lugs it all from place to place, wherever she goes, like a camel train. She wouldn’t trust a fly.’

  It is hardly necessary, I imagine, to say how all this affected me. It was like being told that you, in a whole flock of sparrows, have really turned out, after all, to be nothing less than a golden oriole.

  ‘Most remarkable thing I ever heard,’ he said. ‘You must be an extraordinary person. Can’t believe it—Bertie trusting you.’

  The barely visible line of summer horizon seemed to tilt as another rise of breeze caught my hat and lifted it up, half sideways, from my face.

  ‘Had lunch?’ he said.

  ‘Oh! yes,’ I said. ‘But I suppose you haven’t, have you? Please don’t let me keep you.’

  ‘Never have any, not when it’s so hot,’ he said. ‘Get a pretty square breakfast and then carry through to dinner. Always got to do the dinner anyway. Can’t escape that. Mess tradition, the colonel and that sort of thing.’

  He opened the door of the car.

  ‘Hop in. I’ll drive you back. Come to that, I’ll drive you anywhere.’ He smiled in that marvellously iridescent way of his, full into my eyes. ‘Game? What say?’

  What indeed could I say? My grasp of the next few succeeding moments was so vague that I actually forgot, as we whirled round the high corner beyond the castle, to hold on to my hat. With a whistling explosion it blew off my head and landed in the back seat and my hair started flowing in the wind.

  I suppose he must have asked me at least a dozen times where I would like to be driven that afternoon before I really woke up to a clear realisation of what was going on.

  ‘Tea somewhere? Along the coast?’ He was voluble and gay. ‘Where’s the nearest lighthouse?’

  ‘Oh! I hate lighthouses. They give me a queer feeling in my legs,’ I said, laughing. ‘No, no—inland. Let’s go inland.’

  Suddenly I knew where I wanted to go.

  ‘Do you know the forest?’ I said. ‘It’s about six or seven miles from here. You turn off at a mill. I often go out there, especially in spring. It’s full of primroses in spring. They’re the nearest primroses to the sea.’

  I often think that women who wear their hair short never really know that wonderful feeling of liquid exhilaration that comes from having a warm wind blow like water through hair that is really long.

  There is no other sensation quite like it in the world and by the time we had reached the outskirts of beech and oak and sweet chestnut that make up the forest I was in a state of breathless, half-orgastic delight.

  ‘Well, this is my forest,’ I said.

  When Captain Blaine finally pulled up the car at a point where the trees almost met overhead, we were in a sort of deep green tunnel, wonderfully cool, without sunshine.

  ‘Your forest? Yours?’

  ‘That’s how I always think of it,’ I said. ‘Nobody else ever comes here anyway. Not a soul.’